LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

Chap. Copyriglit No. 

Slielf_._^W_.3 

j UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 

I 



THE 
GREAT MEANING 

OF 

METANOIA 

AN UNDEVELOPED CHAPTER 
IN THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF CHRIST 



A NEW EDITION 

WITH A SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY 

TREADWELL WALDEN 






NEW-YORK 

THOMAS WHITTAKER 
1896 



3^ 



dj-' 



.vi^ 



-->&^ 



Copyright, 1896, 
By Treadwell Walden. 



INSCRIBED 

WITH DEVOTED LOVE 

TO 

MY WIFE, 
GRACE GORDON WALDEN. 



"233 Clarendon Street, 
"Boston, October 15, 1881. 

" Dear Walden : I have just read your * Meta- 
noia' through from beginning to end, and I want 
to tell you how much I enjoyed it, and how much I 
thank you for sending it to me. 

" It is full of inspiration. 

" It makes one think of Christian faith as positive 
and constructive, and not merely destructive and 
remedial. 

" It makes the work of Christ seem worthy of 
Christ. 

" I thank you truly, both for writing it and for 
giving it to me. 

' ' Your sincere friend, 

" Phillips Brooks." 



PEEFAOE. 

The first of these Essays appeared in the 
" American Church Review " for July, 1 88 1 
— following the memorable day in May when 
the Revised Version of the New Testament 
was issued. The paper was soon afterwards 
reprinted separately, and in 1882 was put 
into book form by the present publisher. 

Although its point was made timely by the 
revision, and by the astonishing fact that, in 
a work expressly undertaken in this age to 
correct the misapprehensions of a former 
age, a mistranslation involving such conse- 
quences had been overpassed and perpetu- 
ated, yet the Essay did not set out to be a 
criticism of the New Version in this particu- 
lar. It could not help falling into something 
like it, but its main purpose was to draw 
attention to, and to be a popular exposition of, 
a word in whose enormous potentiality of 
meaning lay, as I beheved, a more true and 
more catholic, a more spiritual and more philo- 



Preface. 

sophical, interpretation of Christianity. The 
Essay could have done as well for this — with 
a httle modification — if the revisers had 
adopted a new rendering which was, in any 
degree, sympathetic with the real import of 
the original. 

As such, I am glad to say — after the nov- 
elty of the New Version had passed — the 
Essay seems to have been accepted : simply 
as an exposition in itself, that might at any 
time be in order; and as a contribution, 
called for under the circumstances, to the 
knowledge and the spirit which ought to in- 
spire that comprehensive English expression 
or that happy combination of words — vary- 
ing according to their connection in the text 
— which may venture sometime hence to 
represent the idea of Merai^om ; a word of 
whose fullness, in its initial position, the New 
Testament itself can be the only adequate 
translation, for, in that initial position, it is 
the key-note of its whole strain. 

There was nothing new in the view itself. 
If there had been, it could not have been 
true. It was as old as the apostolic age. 
And the revival of it was only an attempt to 
uncover and clear out a partially choked well. 



Preface. 

The Greek expression lay directly under the 
eye of any reader of the original, manifestly 
opening down to a great depth, provided his 
eye was disengaged enough from preposses- 
sions to be alive to the fact. The word bore 
the hint of what it was on its very face : an 
intimation that the whole inward nature of 
man was appealed to, all its springs of 
action, all its possibihties of affection. Every 
scholar was aware of its literal meaning — 
and that meaning alone was in itself enough 
to suggest the dropping of an exploring 
plummet. Why this was not done, why 
what was so obvious was overlooked, per- 
haps the second Essay may explain. 

Neither was there anything new in the 
endeavor to recover the lost meaning of the 
word. There had been, even so far back as 
the remote age in which its present custom- 
ary curb and covering had first been imposed 
upon it, an instinctive misgiving that its full 
depth had not been sounded. But the mis- 
giving had been overborne because it was 
not pronounced enough. The Reformation, 
also, developed a restiveness under the same 
ancient limitation — for mud, as well as water, 
was being drawn up now — but the restiveness 



Preface, 

wrought no real purification, because it was 
not articulate enough. At a later day — that 
is, a hundred years ago — an orthodox but 
independent Scotchman, Dr. George Camp- 
bell, exposed the whole imposition with 
startling distinctness, and succeeded so well 
in sweeping the fabric away that many since 
his day — several recent translators among 
them — owe all their new conception of the 
truth to him. But in both his and their 
contentment with the substitute "reforma- 
tion" for "repentance " there lay an implica- 
tion of externaHsm, which betrayed, appa- 
rently, a lack of insight into the spiritual pro- 
fundity of the original expression. The new 
rendering did not, also, popularly prevail, 
though pointing to the practical result in the 
life, because the old one, though falling short 
of the whole truth ("regeneration"), did at 
last reach down far enough to stir the oft- 
stagnant pool of the conscience and the heart. 
It has turned out that the absolute insight 
into the meaning of the word has in our own 
day been given to two scholars hke De 
Quincey and Matthew Arnold, and has found 
its first distinct expression through them, be- 
cause, unlike all that have gone before them, 



Preface, 

their vision was unhampered by any theo- 
logical preconception, and by the necessity 
of looking for an available form of English 
translation. It was simply this which left 
their powers of perception clear ; both open- 
eyed to a palpable meaning, and free-handed 
in their statement of it. But they did not 
raise a signal-flag over the fact when they 
found it, as if it were a discovery, nor con- 
cern themselves especially in identifying the 
word with its issues. They took its evident 
idea as a matter of course, recognized it as 
the original spring-head of the Gospel, re- 
stored it to its natural condition, andpassedon. 
Hence their brief and casual allusions to it 
have escaped the attention that was their 
due. 

I was far on in the preparation of the first 
Essay before I ran accidentally upon the 
passage in De Quincey, and well on in the 
second before I came as accidentally upon 
the coincidence with it and yet variation 
from it of Matthew Arnold — the one indicat- 
ing the intellectual sweep, the other the 
ethical depth of the word ; but I have been 
glad indeed to owe to them both an encour- 
aging and illumining inspiration in the en- 



Preface. 

deavor to show that the principle enunciated 
by " Metanoia " in the outset of the Gospel 
was profound enough to be the underlying 
and prevailing idea of the New Testament 
from beginning to end, and to suggest the 
apphcation of its interpretative potency to 
the teaching of Christ and His apostles. 
And this — the most obvious thing in the 
world to do when once on the track of it — 
is all that appears to be new. 

But even this could be only generally and 
superficially intimated in a review article. 
Still, such as it was, the idea was a siuprise 
and even a revelation to many people. And 
there have been indications enough that it 
has since taken a wide hold. I do not re- 
ceive this impression only from the many 
earnest letters and other like evidences which 
have come to me,. or from an occasional ref- 
erence in a recent commentary or expository 
paper, but from the fact that the view seems 
to have entered largely into pulpit teaching 
and cun-ent thought. It has been made the 
theme of many sermons, and it has given 
occasion to a number of printed essays and 
magazine articles, several even of a philo- 
sophical character. The word " Metanoia " 



Preface. 

itself has also become quite a familiar Eng- 
lish expression, not only for what it really 
means, but, I fear, in some cases where an 
ignorant enthusiasm has laid hold of it, for 
what it cannot be understood to mean. 

It has been made the ground, however, of 
one interesting suggestion, by a writer in the 
" Popular Science Monthly," who has copi- 
ously quoted the Essay, that the term " Met- 
agnostic " — or, better, the words ** Metanos- 
tic " and " Metanoetic " — should displace the 
idea conveyed by '' Agnostic," as expressing 
positively, affirmatively, and hopefully, in 
stead of negatively and despairingly, the at- 
titude even of the purely scientific mind in 
the presence of the Unknown. The sugges- 
tion, it seems, failed with Mr. Huxley, when 
presented to him, because a slight inaccuracy 
in the statement of the primary force of the 
proposed words gave him an opportunity to 
evade it ; but the idea has, however, gone 
far enough into usage to bring about the in- 
troduction of " Metagnostic," with this sig- 
nification, in the " Century Dictionary." 

It is all this and the like of it that has 
kept the memory of the Essay afloat these 



Preface. 

fourteen years and more, that has caused a 
continual inquiry for it, and that has now 
led to its reissue, after being long out of 
print. 

In publishing it again I ought to say that 
I have gone over the whole ground with 
much thorough and painstaking study, and 
have verified all its positions so satisfactorily 
that I have seen no reason to change any of 
them. Indeed, so largely and variously has 
the subject opened and enriched itself, both 
in its Scriptural illustration and its practical 
application, that the present little volume 
seems to stand yet only on the threshold of 
the whole contemplation. But I have been 
under an exigency of brevity in bringing it 
out, and can only hope that it may serve its 
purpose as an introduction, if no more. 

The book has fallen into a threefold form : 
first, the original Essay, slightly retouched 
and with a few notes added ; second, a Sup- 
plementary' Essay, mainly to supply a strong 
point of view in which the other was neces- 
sarily lacking, but incidentally including such 
further intimations of the bearing of " Meta- 
noia" as could be tlirown out by the way ; and 
third, a group of selected comments upon 



Preface. 

the subject by different distinguished hands 
— five of them revisers — to show that I do 
not stand alone in my estimate of its neces- 
sity and importance. 

The last in the list of these — by no means 
the least — is Phillips Brooks. I have also 
set the whole of the opening part of his note 
to me in the forefront of this new edition, 
partly under an impulse of personal affection, 
partly because of the comprehensiveness and 
force of what he wrote. He was my cher- 
ished friend for thirty years, a pride and de- 
Hght to me as I saw him advancing in the 
strength of the breadth and depth of the 
truth he proclaimed, and under the blessing 
which attended a pure, a noble, and a de- 
voted life. In these few words, out of his 
very heart, he seized with characteristic in- 
sight the vital point of the whole considera- 
tion, and they are of that very quaHty in 
thought, conviction, and expression which 
was the secret of his power both as a preacher 
and as a man. In the midst of the concen- 
tric circles drawn round the mark, as it was 
also recognized by the others that I have 
quoted, he thus laid his finger upon the cen- 
tral white; — 



Preface. 

"It makes one think of Christian faith as 
positive and constructive, and not merely 
destructive and remedial. 

" It makes the work of Christ seem worthy 
of Christ." 

In that he said all. 

T. W. 
Cambridge, Mass., 
December, 1895. 



CONTENTS. 



ESSAY I. 

THE GREAT MEANING OF THE WORD METANOIA : 
LOST IN THE OLD VERSION, UNRECOVERED IN THE 
NEW. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The New Testament Idea of Metanoia. . . i 
II. "Metdnoia" Mistranslated ^'Repentance'''' 13 

III. The Intellectual as well as Moral Compass 

of Metanoia 31 

IV. The Inaugural Action of Metanoia in the 

First Age 45 

V. Metanoia the Method of Christ's Teach- 
ing 60 

VI. The Metanoia of St. Paul— Faith and Re- 
newal 71 

VII. Metanoia the Word of Christ to the Pres- 
ent Age 83 

Note. — The View of Matthew Arnold . . 91 
xvii 



Contents. 



ESSAY II. 

THE ECLIPSE OF METANOIA BY PCENITENTIA. 
CHAPTER PAGE 

I. An Impossible Expedient to End it : ^'Re- 
pentance " to be Made to Mean Meta- 

noia 95 

II. Meraw^a Transfigured Greek lOO 

III. "it'^/^«/d!«<r^ " Persistent Latin io8 

IV. The Roman Utilization of ''Repentance " 117 
V. The Gospel in the Shadow of the Law. . 123 

VI. "Disastrous Twilight" in the Revised 

Version 130 

VII. The Power of Latin Prescription 139 

VIII. The True Interpretation 145 



ASSENTING WITNESSES. 

A Word Introductory 152 

The Comments of: 
I. The Right Rev. Brooke Foss Westcott, 

D.D., D.C.L 153 

II. The Rev. Professor Alexander Roberts, 

D.D 154 

III. The Rev. Howard Crosby, D.D.,LL.D. 155 
xviii 



Contents. 



LETTER PAGE 

IV. The Rev. Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D. . 156 

V. The Very Rev. E. H. Plumptre, D.D. . 156 

VI. The Rev. Edward White 157 

VII. The Rev. Professor Alexander V. G. 

Allen, D.D 158 

VIII. The Rev. Professor J. F. Garrison, D.D. 160 

IX. The Rev. Elisha Mulford, LL.D 163 

X. The Rev. Edward T. Bartlett, D.D. . . . 163 

XI. The Rev. Benjamin Franklin, D.D... . 165 

XII. The Right Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D. . 166 



I AM COME A Light into the world, 

THAT WHOSOEVER BELIEVETH ON Me 
MAY NOT ABIDE IN THE DARKNESS. 

John xii. 4.6. 



THE GREAT MEANING OF THE 
WORD METANOIA: LOST IN THE 
OLD VERSION, UNRECOVERED 
IN THE NEW. 

I. 

THE NEW TESTAMENT IDEA OF MEtAnOIA. 

METANOIA is the Greek word— and let- 
ter for letter an English one, if we desire it 
— which bears the sublime burden of the 
original proclamation of the gospel. 

It represents the first utterance of John 
the Baptist as the herald of the Christ, and 
the first utterance of Jesus the Christ as the 
herald of the kingdom of God. It was their 
summons to mankind, preceding the an- 
nouncement of the power that was approach- 
ing, of the revelation that was at hand. 

If we recur to the image involved in the 
words "herald," " proclamation" — the image 
implied in the narrative — it was the note of 



The Great Meanhig of Metdnoia. 

a trumpet outside the walls, and the call of 
a messenger to open the gates. 

In order the better to get at its meaning, 
let us now imagine some one who has never 
read the Enghsh New Testament, and who 
has had no especial bias given to his ideas 
by any theological system. All we will sup- 
pose for him is a knowledge of Greek and 
a spiritual instinct which will enable him to 
rise into the frequent transcendental mean- 
ing of the Greek of the New Testament. 

He knows enough to know that he is deal- 
ing with the record of a divine revolution in 
the affairs of men, and that the human lan- 
guage to which the account was committed 
is struggling to utter adequately the depth of 
inspiration behind it. 

He knows that the record was committed 
to writing only after the bearings of the his- 
tory were fully understood and the concep- 
tion of its meaning was fully matured. 

He knows that what is before him is a con- 
densation as to events, and a translation as 
to ideas ; in other words, if we confine the re- 
mark to the four gospels, that the historical 
part is as brief as it is profound, and that 

2 



The New Testament Idea of Metdnoia. 

the doctrinal part is not only briefly and pro- 
foundly expressed, but was transferred to the 
Greek from the Aramaic vernacular in which 
it was at first expansively spoken. 

He is prepared, therefore, to see not only 
a representative depth in each event, but, 
especially, a comprehensive force in every 
cardinal word. 

In the very outset of the life of Christ he 
comes upon the word '' Metanoia," and in a 
connection which gives it the all-prominent 
place. He takes in the significance of its 
position at once. It conveys the summons 
of the herald, and of the herald who was 
freighted with the good news which the whole 
New Testament afterwards unfolds. Here in 
epitome, he naturally thinks, must be all the 
" Upward Calling " of God. No word, there- 
fore, in the New Testament can be greater 
than this. 

Hence he must interpret it as a condensed 
expression of what was originally said in 
large, and as an expression, also, which was 
fixed upon long after the event, when every- 
thing was understood, as the fit one to carry 
the great burden. If this is its anticipatory 
3 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

reach, if this is its heralding grasp, he natu- 
rally sets about inquiring what is its history 
and what its elementary weight. 

When we imagine such a fresh reader of 
the Greek Testament as this we place our- 
selves in the situation to pursue his inquiry. 

The hteral meaning of " Metanoia," or, 
rather, the nearest expression to it in English, 
is " Change of Mind," a phrase too much worn 
by familiar use to be available as a render- 
ing, but an idea capable of many equivalent 
variations in the English tongue. It will be 
more convenient, however, for our present 
purpose to employ the phrase as if its native 
force had not been thus impaired. 

What word is more expressive than 
" Change "? what more comprehensive than 
"Mind"? 

" Change," in the radical sense we here 
intend, when applied to the "mind," ought to 
suggest something hardly short of a trans- 
mutation ; not of essence, of course, but of 
consciousness. We understand by a change 
of place the occupation of another place; 
a change of condition, another condition ; a 
4 



The New Testament Idea of Metdtioia. 

change of form, another form. We can ima- 
gine the otherwise unchangeable man under- 
going, in like manner, a " Change of Mind " ; 
what Coleridge coined the word " transmenta- 
tion " to express : a sort of mental transfigura- 
tion, under which the Mind, when placed in a 
new situation, thinks new thoughts, receives 
new impressions, forms new tastes, inclina- 
tions, purposes, develops new aptitudes ; such 
a Change may be good or evil, but such a 
change is possible. 

For what is the "Mind"? It is that 
spiritual part of us which receives and assim- 
ilates whatever it has an affinity for in the 
world outside, whether that world be spiritual 
or material. It is the whole group of facul- 
ties which compose the inteUigence. It is 
sight and perception, thought and reflection, 
apprehension and comprehension — all that 
is popularly known as the intellect or under- 
standing. But it also embraces more than 
this, namely, a large portion of the moral and 
affectional nature. It occupies the realm of 
the heart. Thus it comes about that, in com- 
mon speech, the terms " mind " and " heart " 
are often interblended, one overlapping the 
5 



The Great Meaning of Metdfioia. 

field of the other. We speak of the heart as 
if it were the thinking principle. It has its 
thoughts as well as its affections. We also 
speak of the mind as if it had feelings as 
well as perceptions. The will, too, seems to 
be as much at home in one as in the other. 
What the mind fancies it will do, it shortly 
resolves to do, is minded to do. What the 
mind also fastens its attention upon, it shortly 
fastens its love upon. We love with the 
whole mind as well as with the whole heart, 
soul, and strength. 

When, therefore, we speak of the Mind, 
we often mean the heart as well as the brain, 
but we never mean the heart without the 
brain. The Mind proper is the masculine, 
intellectual element, strong and foremost, of 
which the heart is the feminine, affectional 
counterpart, always in attendance upon it, al- 
w^ays at one with it. As " Man " is the generic 
name for Adam and Eve, so " Mind " is the 
generic name for this twofold nature of man.^ 

When, then, " Mind " means so much, and 
*' Change " may be made to mean so much, 

1 It may be well to remember that "man" and 
" mind " are etymologically the same. A change of 
the Mind, therefore, is a change of the Man. 
6 



The New Testament Idea of Metdnoia. 

to speak of a " Change of Mind " is to stand 
on the verge of a great conception. 

Now we are introduced into the fullness of 
the Greek word " Metanoia." Nous is the 
precise equivalent of '' Mind." It is intellect, 
first and foremost, but it is intellect inter- 
blended, in its action, with the nature behind 
it. There is no mystic partition dividing the 
one from the other. It is the whole soul. 
It is Mind, first, in the sense of perception, 
knowledge, thought. It is Mind, next, in the 
sense of feehng, disposition, will. And Nous 
is the body of the word " Metanoia." Metd is 
a preposition which, when compounded with 
Nous^ means after .^ Metanoia is the After- 
Mind : perception, knowledge, thought, feel- 
ing, disposition, will, afterwa7'ds. The Mind 
has entered upon a new stage, upon some- 
thing beyond. If the prefix wqtq pro, '' Pro- 
noia " would mean perception before, thought 
before, a state of mind before experience. 
But Metanoia is a state of mind after experi- 

1 "After,^^ in such a connection, denotes the idea 
of change or transformation. ISoeo), to see, Xo per- 
ceive. Meravoicj, to see or perceive afterwards. 
Hence, to change one^s view. 
7 



The Great Mea?iing of Metdnoia. 

ence ; the mental condition which has devel- 
oped itself after an entirely new set of cir- 
cumstances has encompassed and invaded 
the consciousness. 

Metd, therefore, introduces the Mind in 
the act of progress, a " change " taking place 
either by evolution or by revolution ; devel- 
opment through any cause or in any form, 
when the Mind is operated upon by consid- 
erations within or by conditions without. ^ 

In this statement of the capacity of the 

1 A lay friend, after this paper was written, sent 
us the following : ' ' The force of Metd is clearly this, 
viz., ' end for end,' or ' in the opposite direction,' or 
'anew.' . . . For the root of Metd is the English 
* mid,' and Metd is at bottom the English * amid.' 
From this idea (one of situation) it progresses to 
another idea of direction; and in this use it has the 
sense of ' going right against,' in the sense of ' strik- 
ing fair and square,' or * right in the viiddle.'' Thus 
it gets the meaning of ' oppositeness of direction, and 
its force in * Metanoia ' is to show that the action of the 
mind is now to be precisely in the opposite direction 
to what was before the case. ... I strongly wish I 
could provoke you to examine the word * Metanoia ' 
philologically. In its philology lie many truths. 
Noia appears to be a worn-down form for gnoia 
(compare agnoia, not anoia), and the root seems to 
be gen, meaning to beget, produce, or, as we say. 



The New Testamejit Idea of Metdnoia. 

word we are drawing upon the literal ele- 
ments of the compound exhaustively. We 
are obliged to do this because, as in the case 
of many other cardinal words in the New 
Testament, we cannot fall back upon its 
classical use for its scriptural definition. In 
the former it was often as weak an expres- 
sion as our own " change of mind," and was 
employed in very much the same superficial 
way. It meant a change of perception, of 
opinion, of purpose, of feeling, in ordinary 
affairs, with the natural consequence, some- 
times, of a change of action. It was a cur- 
rent expression for any alteration of mind or 
view, and for whatever retrospective emotion 
might attend the fact. 

Its scriptural definition comes to us under 
very grand circumstances ; the word is made 

conceive. From the same root is gennao, to beget. 
Noia {genoia) is the begetting, shaping, or production 
of anything in the inner and mental world ; thus all 
the operations or creations of the mind. The Latin 
gigno, genitor, gnosco, English ' knows,' are all from 
this root. The use of getting back to this philological 
meaning is to apply ' Metanoia ' to all the operations 
of the mind, whether of wish, thought, or action, 
will, understanding, life." 
9 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

over and enlarged by its environment, as if 
it had been reinspired and been born anew. 
We are compelled to seek its meaning in the 
abstract, native force of the compound as 
thus vivified by the situation in which we 
find it. Its history in this respect is that of 
the language of the New Testament. 

When the Greek language, released by 
the conquests of Alexander the Great, three 
centuries and more before the Christian era, 
spread over the known world and became the 
universal language, its forms, constructions, 
and meanings met with curious modifica. 
tions as it came in contact with the hfe and 
thought of the countries it had invaded. 
When in time it struck the Hebrew mind 
and religion at Alexandria the Septuagint 
translation of the Old Testament rose gradu- 
ally into being ; but in the act of reexpress- 
ing ideas and principles so entirely out of 
the range of the Greek imagination, even 
that perfect and elaborate tongue mounted 
to a level and breathed an atmosphere it 
had never occupied before. It took, in 
many instances, a new color, a new charac- 
ter. There could have been no other result 
when the wealth of divine revelation and of 



The New Testament Idea of Metdnoia. 

the story of the only true religion was com- 
mitted for recoinage to the exquisite resources 
of such a mint. It was now the " much-re- 
fined gold " receiving the stamp of the current 
common coin, but imparting to it a hitherto 
unknown value. Familiar words began to 
ring with a strange quality.^ 

If this was so, nearly three centuries be- 
fore the Christian era, how must it have 
been when there came such a revelation to 
put into words, and such a revolution to put 
on record, as were ushered in with the Chris- 
tian religion? Upon the Greek language, 
again, fell the burden of the new Scriptures, 
and this time, not by translation, but by 

1 The Septuagint represents only a half-way step 
in this assignment of the Greek language to the ex- 
pression of Hebrew ideas. " The Seventy prepared 
the way in Greek," says Cremar, in his Preface to his 
" Biblico-theological Lexicon," " for the New Testa- 
ment proclamation of saving truth. Fine as is their 
tact, it must be allowed that their language differs 
from that of the New Testament as the well-meant 
and painstaking effort of the pupils differs from the 
renewing and creative hand of the master." This 
shows itself in a less definite use of "Metanoia" 
than in the New Testament, where it is absolute. 
II 



The Great Meajimg of Metdnoia. 

direct inspiration. The pagan tongue had to 
wreathe itself into new phraseologies in order 
to give what utterance it could to ideas well- 
nigh unutterable. Words which had passed 
colloquially from mouth to mouth in the 
cities of Greece, words which were current in 
every-day speech everywhere in the world, 
some whose meanings had never before been 
profound, others whose usage had worn them 
thin, now rose into a significance so powerful 
and so sacred that they could only be used 
as temple-money by all ages to come. Ex- 
pressions conveying a divine meaning, now 
most familiar to us, were occasions of aston- 
ishment to pagan and Jew alike when they 
were lifted into connections which transfig- 
ured them. Such, we know, were "faith," 
"hope," "love," "light," "truth," "life," 
" peace," " liberty " ; such were " redemp- 
tion," "atonement," "righteousness," "resur- 
rection " ; such were " Saviour " and " apos- 
tle," and many more which might be named. 
And such was " Metanoia." So great as 
this was what Schleiermacher calls " the lan- 
guage-moulding power of Christianity." 



II. 



" METANOIA " MISTRANSLATED " REPEN- 
TANCE." 

When " Metanoia " was taken up into the 
uses of the New Testament it came to mean, 
according to Archbishop Trench, "that 
mighty change in mind, heart, and hfe, 
wrought by the Spirit of God, which we call 
repentance y i 

"Which we call repentance^^\ What a 
diminuendo in the statement is here! The 
swelling note suddenly gives up its breath 
and subsides into this! It is we, the Eng- 
Hsh-speaking world, he says, who call that 
"mighty change" " repentance. ^^ 

In other words, this is the rendering of it 
in our English Bible, and the accredited ex- 
pression for it in all theological literature. 

1 See Trench's " Synonyms of the New Testa- 
ment," p. 241, sec. Ixix. 

13 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

Here, now, we come upon the practical 
and all-important point of this inqmy. For, 
putting these words, " Metanoia " and " re- 
penta7ice^'' side by side, what a radical diver- 
gency there is between them! 

We are supposing the reader to be look- 
ing at the two with a perfectly fresh and un- 
sophisticated perception. He already knows 
what the Greek " Metanoia " etymologically 
means ; let us now remind him what the Latin 
'* repentance " etymologically means. In its 
primary sense it fails to come anywhere near 
the other. 

Its central idea is the idea oi p(Enitentia, 
from pcena, pain ; suffering in view of being 
liable to punishment ; hence grief over an act 
for which satisfaction might be demanded. 

It would be fair to allow it also a secon- 
dary signification ; suffering in view of the 
badness of the act itself, without regard to 
its consequences. 

The prefix ;'<f, back or again, adds to this 
the idea of looking back, or looki?ig again, 
with sorrow upon what has been done amiss. 

The word thus intensively communes with 
the past, and represents an emotion only. 
This may be produced by a Change of 



^'Metdnoia " Mistranslated "Repentance.''^ 

Mind, and it may have influence in produc- 
ing a Change of Mind. It may be poten- 
tially equal to amendment of life, but it is 
forcing the word to put even that meaning 
into it, and more than forcing is necessary 
to make it " express that mighty Change in 
mind, heart, and life, wrought by the Spirit 
of God," which Archbishop Trench admits 
is the meaning of " Metanoia." 

At the best it can only hang on the skirts 
of the great Greek expression, for that means 
a movement of the whole mind forwards, to 
which a looking backwards is only incidental. 
Metanoia embraces any consideration which 
may cause the Mind to ''change." It implies 
the whole circle of influences, repentance 
among them, which may affect or mould the 
Mind. It necessarily brings about repenta7ice 
as one of the results of its operation, but it 
brings about renewal of hfe as the great re- 
sult of all. 

In saying this we do not intend to ignore 
the office of repeittance in its strict sense, 
nor to put that all-necessary conviction of 
sin which characterizes the Christian religion 
in any indirect relation to the Christian life. 
15 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

We are only questioning the word as a ren- 
dering of '' Metanoia " ; as representing sim- 
ply an emotion, not intellection in any way. 
Far back in the heart is the capacity for 
that emotion shut up, awaiting its proper 
occasions. We cannot conceive of its com- 
ing into activity unless the Mind has been 
already engaged, but we can conceive of the 
Mind being full of many processes, involv- 
ing Change of thought or purpose or feeling, 
wherein it has not been concerned at all. 
In this lies its first palpable incompetency to 
represent so comprehensive a word. 

But it may be said that it has been given a 
signification, theologically, which bears it into 
all that is equivalent to a Change of Mind, 
and, even further than that, to amendment 
of life. It has, we are told, this recognized 
meaning among all evangelical authorities, 
and is so understood by all practical Chris- 
tians. If this were really so, and it had so 
burst the chrysalis of its etymology as to float 
in our consciousness arbitrarily and absolutely 
for as much as this, even then it were imprac- 
ticable to make it compass what is meant by 
"Metanoia" in the New Testament. The 
i6 



''Metdnoia " Mistranslated ^^ Repentance. ^^ 

common uses of language drag it down. It 
cannot sustain itself at such a height. Not 
only are the meshes of its origin inseparable 
from it, but it is too much in the web of 
popular speech. No word is used more 
loosely even by theologians, except among 
very careful precisians. It slips out every- 
where in untechnical connections. It will 
back to its vernacular use. It will emerge 
from the popular dictionary, in its native 
and simple meaning, the richest and weighti- 
est of all its familiar sisterhood of synonyms, 
to give force to the diction when sorrow of 
a godly kind is meant. Even in the Prayer- 
book it is convertibly employed with " peni- 
te7ice^'' and there is every indication that there 
nothing more, or not a great deal more, is 
intended by it.^ 

1 A few instances, in the Prayer-book, not only of 
the synonymous use of "penitence''^ and " repejt- 
tance,'''' but also of their distinction from " amendment 
of life " : In the General Confession : " Restore Thou 
those who oxt penitent, according to Thy promises." 
In the larger Absolution : " Declare and pronounce, 
. . . being penitent. . . . Wherefore . . . grant us 
true repentance. " In the shorter Absolution : "Prom- 
ised forgiveness of sins to all those who, with hearty 
repentance and true faith, turn unto Him." In the 
17 



TJie Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

It has proved too strong and full for this 
in the penitential atmosphere of the Christian 
hfe to be parted with for advanced dogmat- 
ical purposes only. Hence an element of 
confusion which robs it of dogmatical force. 

But there is another. In the Authorized 
Version we find it varying about in a way that 
requires often considerable spiritual discern- 
ment to tell where it stands for " Metanoia," 
and where it does not; for there is another 
word, " Metameleia," ^ which exactly means 
repentance in its strict sense, and is also so 

Litany : " Give us true repentance, and endue us with 
grace to amend our lives.^'' Collect for Ash Wednes- 
day: " Dost forgive the sins of all those who are 
penitent, create and make in us nriv and contrite 
hearts." Third Ash Wednesday prayer: "Who 
meekly acknowledge our vileness, and truly repent 
us of our faults." In the Communion Exhortations : 
" If withatrue/<f«//^«/heart . . . repent ye truly ior 
your sins past, have a lively and steadfast faith, . . . 
amend your lives. ^'' " Ye who do truly repent . . . and 
intend to lead a nnv life^ In the Confession : " We 
acknowledge and bewail, etc. . . . We do earnestly 
repent and are heartily sorry." In the Family 
Prayer: "Give them repentance and better minds," 
etc. 

1 Only the verb is used in the New Testament. 
18 



''Metdnoia " Mistranslated "Repentance" 

rendered. This variation occurs frequently 
enough to make us wonder whether the trans- 
lators attached any distinct doctrinal signifi- 
cance to it at all ; and we might also be par- 
doned for wondering whether they were fully 
aware of the unique value of " Metanoia " 
wherever they found it.^ 

When the Enghsh Scriptures themselves 
do not make a distinction it can hardly be 
expected that theological formularies will suc- 

1 What are we to think, for instance, when we read 
that Judas " repented himself " {fiera^eATjOelg) ; or how 
vivid must the peculiar sense of Metanoia — even the 
admitted one — have been in minds which could dis- 
miss the following passage to be " understanded of 
the people "? 

" For though I made you sorry with a letter, I do 
not repent {juerafiilo/Ltat], though I did repent l/xera- 
f£e2.6/i7jv]. . . . Now I rejoice, not that ye were made 
sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance \}itTavoLav\. 
. . . For godly sorrow worketh repentance \jieTdvoLav\ 
to salvation not to be i-epented of [auETa[i£%r]Tov]." 
(2 Cor. vii. 8-IO.) Where is Metanoia in its lone 
and comprehensive grandeur here? In the original 
it stands nobly at the top, in the ascending scale, but 
not in the version. Where, too, is " evangelical n*- 
pentance"'^! Certainly, in this place, not apparently 
above the other kind. 

Judas was unquestionably equal to repentance, as 
19 



The Great Meaning of Metd?ioia. 

ceed in doing so. And, moreover, as the 
English Bible is written in the common lan- 
guage of the people, and, as such, belongs to 
our heritage of English hterature, it blends 
itself more with this than with the techni- 
cahties of theology ; its forms of speech are 
popular, and what is meant by '' repentance " 
in general hterature, in current talk, and in 
dictionary definitions will necessarily be under- 
stood as intended by it. " Repe7ita7ice " is a 

people generally understand it, but was, as unques- 
tionably, far short of Metanoia as his Master under- 
stood it. St. Paul could very naturally repent of 
having written a letter which had caused pain, and as 
naturally reverse the feeling when he found that sor- 
row had produced so substantial a thing as a Change 
of Mind, the condition of all others that he most 
valued, in which he stood himself, which, when at- 
tained, was so fixed as to be equivalent to " salvation " 
and was" not ioht repented of .''^ And yet these two un- 
equal words of the original are yoked under one and 
the same English word ; and this very English word is 
conveniently supposed by some to bear two senses, 
one sense natural and the other technical! 

The revisers, in this awkward passage, have trans- 
lated //era/zfAo/za^ " regret," leaving fierdvoia to " re- 
pentance. '' But Judas, it will be seen (Matt, xxvii. 3), 
still " repents himself "! His remorse, fruitful only 
of hemp, continues to be as respectably characterized, 
20 



"Metdnoia " Mistranslated ^' Repentances 

favorite word among all writers, especially 
those engaged in depicting life and action ; 
let any one pause at it as it comes up in his 
general reading, and he will see what it in- 
variably is in the consciousness of the people, 
and how far short, therefore, it must always 
fall of the biblical word *' Metanoia." 

But there is another and even more seri- 
ous matter involved in this confusion of mean- 
ing. The use of the word '' repentance " for 

in the New Version, as if he had been " made sorry 
after a godly sort." So again, in Romans xi. 29, 
aiieraiieTiTjra is rendered " without repentance.''^ (See 
also elsewhere. ) The revisers who have kept so care- 
fully to St. Mark's oft-repeated "straightway," for 
the sake of uniformity, might also have kept these 
words apart, throughout, for a better reason. 

Dr. Roberts, in his " Companion to the Revised 
New Testament," speaks of these two words as 
" most desirable to distinguish, wherever that is pos- 
sible. The one word," he says, " means simply to 
* rue ' or ' regret ' a course which has been followed ; 
the other implies that thorough change of mind which 
is implied in Christian repentance.'''' But he con- 
tinues (and he must be referring to the assigned or 
the self-imposed limitations under which the revisers 
labored): " Unfortunately it is not always possible 
to express the distinction in our language" (p. 124). 
21 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

" Metanoia" has thrown an almost exclusively 
emotional character around both the original 
proclamation of the gospel and its present 
call. Despite himself the reader hears the 
" Repent ye! " of John the Baptist and of the 
Saviour, like a cry, a note of danger, full of 
terror, amid which the hearts of the people 
stood still, instead of what it really was, the 
invocation of a mind, heart, and life which 
should befit such a glad and glorious " change " 
as the kingdom of heaven on earth. If the 
call had really been '' Repejit yeT^ it would 
have been only an appeal to the feelings ; and 
as, w^ithout question, a great deal of the call 
of the gospel is to the conscience where it 
" looks back " to what has been done amiss, 
and for which punishment has been incurred, 
it is not strange that in many quarters this 
supposed appeal to the impenitent nature 
only has been taken up as the burden of all 
preaching, all spiritual counsel ; an appeal 
in their hands often wrought up with terrific 
penal imagery; and then the fright which 
has ensued and its consequences have been 
accepted as the change of heart. 

Or, if not always so grossly mistaken, yet 
there is a tendency thus created to regard an 



"Metdnoia " Mistranslated ^^ Repentance. ^^ 

emotional condition, a general passion of re- 
ligious feeling, however induced, as the seat 
of efficacy with God, and as the only safe 
and promising state in which to begin and 
continue the Christian life. 

Even more : this is sometimes considered 
as itself the Christian Hfe. The result has 
often been the extraordinary incongruity of a 
life of zeal unaccompanied by a life of prin- 
ciple, penitejice and faith developed in con- 
spicuous measure in view of an ideal sinful- 
ness, and the living conscience, the practical 
right, sunk in pharisaic forms which satisfy 
certain low standards of outward righteous- 
ness! 

The Metanoia is not here. The profound 
ethical sense has not been awakened at all. 
Fear has no genuine ethical power. Sorrow 
has no sure ethical consequence. Excitement 
of any kind can bear, of itself, no ethical fruit. 
None of these can have respect with God. 
The only thing that can be regarded by Him 
is that which He has arranged everything to 
bring about in us : that spiritual perception of 
the right and the true which grows within and 
around a Mind that is being gradually edu- 
23 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

cated up to the divine standard ; the nature 
wide open in front, not only looking behind, 
and receiving the whole counsel of God, not 
a part of it ; every faculty enlightened, every 
feeling inspired ; the entire man engaged ; 
conviction, not excitement ; earnestness, not 
impulse ; habitude, not paroxysm ; the heart 
tempered by the understanding, the under- 
standing warmed by the heart ; this, the con- 
summate and yet attainable condition, this, 
the Metanoia, lived alike by Master and dis- 
ciple, this, the '' Mind " of Christ, and made 
possible to all by the Spirit of God — this is 
not conveyed in the '^ Repent ye T^ of our 
gospels, nor does it come within the range 
of much of the teaching which falls on the 
world's ear. The all-encompassing grandeur 
of an announcement which takes in the 
whole of Hfe, and calls upon man to enlarge 
his consciousness with the eternal and the 
spiritual, to live on the scale of another Hfe, 
to let his character grow under this great 
knowledge, to let his conduct fall into the lines 
of the revealed divine will — all this is lost. 

How did such an extraordinary mistrans- 
lation get into our New Testament? 
24 



"Metdnoia " Mistranslated ''Repentance''' 

It can be attributed to what we have al- 
ready hinted at, and some evidence of which 
we have already given, namely, a failure to 
grasp the comprehensive and far-reaching 
character of the word. It came too early 
in the record for the translators to perceive 
its transcendental level. This they easily 
did with some of the other words we have 
named, which came later, and when they had 
mounted the swell of the ocean on which 
they had embarked. 

They did not catch this at once as the key- 
note of the New Testament, for the strain of 
the Old had not yet died away. And there 
was, besides, another music ringing in their 
ears : the sombre tones of a traditional the- 
ology which even the thunders of the Refor- 
mation had not drowned. 

The age, too, was a Latin-speaking age. 
The translators read their Greek through the 
lenses of a language whose grain was too 
coarse to admit its finer spirit. The Vulgate 
also was an authority older than any man- 
uscript they possessed. They could not 
bring themselves to render its ''Do pen- 
ance " for " Metanoeite," but they could not 
divest themselves of the impression of pen- 
25 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

itetice with which that rendering tinged the 
word. 

Still they showed some signs of divergence, 
and it led to controversy. Beza, for instance, 
had revolted so far as to get his composition 
of " Metanoia " wrong, and make it Metd 
and dnoia, a change from a " want of mind," 
a change from "folly," and so rendered it 
resipiscentia in his Latin version — an act, 
however, which still showed his mental bias.^ 

We have not the authorities at hand to 
prove the fact, but it looks very much as if 

1 The reader will be interested in getting a glimpse 
into this controversy when it started at the opening of 
the Reformation. " Luther, it will be remembered, 
first saw the practical value of philological study when 
he was puzzling over the expression pccnitentiam 
agite {' Do pe^iaiice''), which the Vulgate uses for 
the Greek word that in the English translation is ren- 
dered ' repent.'' Was it possible, he said to himself, 
that Christ and the apostles could really bid men d« 
penance ? Did the New Testament really stand on the 
side of his opponents, and of all the gross corruptions 
which the doctrine oi penance had introduced? Me- 
lanchthon solved this difficulty by showing to Luther 
that the Greek word jizTavoeirz, which Jerome had 
translated ' Do penance, ' really and etymologically 
meant ' Change your mind.' From that moment 
the Reformation entered into a conscious alliance 
26 



"Metdnoia " Mistranslated "jRepentance.''^ 

the English translators, who depended so 
much upon Beza and his Greek text and his 
Latin version, were misled by the same bias 
and compounded " Metanoia " in the same 
way. If they did, it explains everything. 
Their " repentance " were a very good render- 
ing in that case ; and hence, then, the uncer- 
tain sound with which their New Testament 
opens to this day. 

But what shall we say for the Revised 
Version if this be so? The revisers do not 
so compound it. Is it possible that so pal- 
pable a misinterpretation of the Greek has 
now been perpetuated because it had grown 
like a fossil into the substance of popular the- 
ology and so escaped recognition in the Greek 
as a fossil ? 

with the New Learning." (Professor W. Robertson 
Smith, " The Old Testament in the Jewish Church," 
Lecture II.) 

The Genevan Version, a Continental and more inde- 
pendent one, with which the Authorized Version ran 
in rivalry for nearly fifty years, rendered " Metano- 
elte " "Amend your lives." The Authorized itself 
has a marginal rendering in St. Matthew's Gospel 
alternative to "fruits meet for repentance ^^ \ "an- 
swerable to amendment of life " — omitted, however, 
in the New Version. 

27 



The Great Meajiing of Metdnoia. 

It may now be imagined with what inter- 
est and expectation we looked forward to the 
New Version, realizing full well the difficulty 
of reproducing the original in this place and 
elsewhere more faithfully, and of making a 
change so startling, but hoping that, at the 
least, a marginal rendering would indicate the 
literal alternative, or a glossarial note define 
the Greek expression in a way that would go 
far to correct the Enghsh one. But the re- 
vision flows on, making a ripple of change 
in almost every verse, yet with not a sign of 
perturbation over this sunken rock. Neither 
a light-ship nor a buoy warns of a spot where 
there has been shipwreck before now. 

We understand, however, that it was the 
subject of discussion among the revisers, and 
that the matter w^as finally passed by, not be- 
cause the present rendering was satisfactory, 
but because no one equivalent EngHsh word 
could be found comprehensive enough for 
the purpose. 

What, then, has been so long lost in the 
Old Version, remains unrecovered in the 
New because of a reluctance to employ a 
paraphrase! The poverty of our language, 
in this respect, is to keep us poor. 
28 



''Metdiioia " Mistranslated ^'Repentances 

Or, it may be, something else was at the 
bottom of it, symptoms of which are appa- 
rent in other instances. It may have been 
the reluctance of that kind of conservatism 
which prefers not to disturb traditional notions 
or long-established formularies. 

We comfort ourselves, however, with the 
thought that the New Version is not a final- 
ity, but only tentative to that which shall yet 
meet the brave demand of the present age. 
What we have is, in many respects, a bold 
and noble move, but the whole of English 
Christendom is in council over the matter 
now, and suggestions and criticisms will flow 
in for some years to come ; an advance in 
sentiment, also, will take place, making the 
way clearer and easier to a more fearless 
and absolute transfer of the original into our 
native tongue. 

We feel prepared, at least, to say, with re- 
gard to the present point, that the necessary 
employment of a paraphrase should not be 
an occasion for hesitation in making so im- 
portant an alteration. We can leave it to the 
candid reader to judge which is the more ob- 
jectionable: a resort to a paraphrase which 
really translates, or the preference for a tech- 
29 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

nical word, to say nothing of an uncertain 
one, which is always itself iji need of transla- 
tion. Better, even, were the bald phrase 
" Change of Mind," with an explanation 
which would give it fullness and dignity, than 
the misleading rendering we have to put up 
with now. There is no fear but that a nobler 
expression can be framed, for St. Paul him- 
self, as we shall shortly see, found no difficulty 
in ringing many changes upon the idea of 
the word, which melt very kindly into sim- 
ple Enghsh. 



30 



III. 



THE INTELLECTUAL AS WELL AS MORAL 
COMPASS OF METANOIA. 

So far as we have now gone we have prob- 
ably done more to awaken the reader's at- 
tention to the question of the inadequacy of 
" repentance " as a rendering of ** Metanoia," 
than to convince him that the position is 
rightly taken. We must go for the evidence 
of this to the Scriptures themselves ; but, in 
doing so, let us recur first to our imaginary 
scholar whom we have supposed to be re- 
ceiving his impression freshly from the origi- 
nal. 

Happily, as it turns out, we are not obHged 
to go even so far as to imagine such a scholar, 
for the impressions of an actual one of that 
kind came recently to our hand, which are in 
such singular coincidence with the view we 
are trying to present that we venture to quote 
them entire. We are glad, also, to avail our- 
31 



The Great Mea7iing of Metdnoia. 

selves of his brief dissertation as a guide in 
directing a part of the inquiry. 

That accomphshed master of Greek, De 
Quincey (who, if any one ever did, held his 
mind clear and free in a scholarly conscious- 
ness of the transcendent atmosphere into 
which the Greek language rose when it was 
summoned to meet the necessities of Chris- 
tian truth and the exigencies of divine in- 
spiration), was, it seems, actually confronted 
by an intelHgent friend Math the very ques- 
tion which is now engaging us. The record 
of it will be found in his "Autobiographic 
Sketches." i 

" Lady Carbury," he writes, " one day told 
me that she could not see any reasonable 
ground for what is said of Christ, and else- 

1 " He [De Quincey] passed through a number of 
schools and . . . was distinguished for his eminent 
knowledge of Greek. At fifteen he was pointed out 
by his master (himself a ripe scholar) to a stranger 
in the remarkable words : ' That boy could harangue 
an Athenian mob better than you or I could address 
an English one.' ... In this, as in the subtlety of 
the analytical power, De Quincey must have strongly 
resembled Coleridge." (Harriet Martineau, "Bio- 
graphical Sketches," p. 95.) 
32 



Intellectual Compass of Metdnoia. 

where of John the Baptist, that He opened 
His mission by preaching ' repentance.^ Why 
* repefttance^} Why then, more than at any 
other time? Her reason for addressing this 
remark to me was that she feared there might 
be some error in the translation of the Greek 
expression. I rephed that, in my opinion, 
there was, and that I had myself always been 
irritated by the entire irrelevance of the Eng- 
hsh word, and by something very like cant, 
on which the whole burden of the passage is 
thrown. How was it any natural preparation 
for a vast spiritual revelation that men should, 
first of all, acknowledge any special duty of 
repentance ? The repentance, if any move- 
ment of that nature could be intelligently sup- 
posed called for, should more naturally follow 
this great revolution — which as yet, both in 
its principle and in its purpose, was altogether 
mysterious — than herald it or ground it. In 
my opinion the Greek word ' Metdnoia ' con- 
cealed a most profound meaning — a mea7iing of 
prodigious compass — ivhich boi'e no allusio7i to 
any ideas whatever of repentance. The Metd 
carried with it an emphatic expression of its 
original idea — the idea of transfer, of transla- 
tion ; or, if we prefer a Grecian to a Roman 



The Great Mea?iing of Aletdnoia, 

appareling, the idea of a metamorphosis. And 
this idea, to what is it apphed? Upon what 
object is the idea of spiritual transfiguration 
made to bear? Simply upon the noetic or in- 
tellectual faculty — the faculty of shaping and 
conceiving things under their true relations. 
The holy herald of Christ, and Christ Him- 
self, the Finisher of prophecy, made procla- 
mation alike of the same mysterious summons, 
as a baptism or rite of initiation, namely, 
MeravoetTs: Henceforth transfigure your 
theory of moral truth ; the old theory is laid 
aside as infinitely insufficient ; a new and 
spiritual revelation is estabhshed. Metanoe- 
ite! Contemplate moral truth as radiating 
from a new center ; apprehend it under trans- 
figured relations. 

"John the Baptist, like other earlier 
prophets, delivered a message which, prob- 
ably enough, he did not himself more than 
dimly understand, and never in its full com- 
pass of meaning. Christ occupied another 
station. Not only was He the original In- 
terpreter, but He was Himself the Author — 
Founder at once, and Finisher — of the great 
transfiguration applied to ethics, which He 
and the Baptist alike announced as forming 
34 



Intellectual Couipass of Metdnoia. 

the code of the new revolutionary era now 
opening its endless career. The human race 
was summoned to bring a transfiguring sense 
and spirit of interpretation (Metanoia) to a 
transfigured ethics; an altered organ to an 
altered object. This is by far the grandest 
miracle recorded in Scripture. No exhibi- 
tion of blank power — not the arresting of the 
earth's motion, not the calhng back of the 
dead to life — can approach in grandeur to 
this miracle which we daily behold, namely, 
the inconceivable mystery of having written 
and sculptured upon the tablets of man's 
heart a new code of moral distinctions, all 
modifying — many reversing — the old ones. 
What would have been thought of any 
prophet if he should have promised to trans- 
figure the celestial mechanics ; if he had said, 
' I will create a new pole-star, a new zodiac, 
and new laws of gravitation ; briefly, I will 
make a new earth and new heavens '? And 
yet a thousand times more awful it was to 
undertake the writing of new laws upon the 
spiritual conscience of man. ' Metanoeite! ' 
was the cry from the wilderness. Wheel into 
a new center your moral system ; geocentiic 
has that system been up to this hour, that 
35 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

is, having earth and the earthly for its start- 
ing-point; henceforth make it heliocentric, 
that is, with the sun, or the heavenly, for the 
principle of motion." ^ 

This brilliant statement we believe to be 
true as far as it goes ; but the heralding was 
not all a bare summons. It was accompanied 
by every credential which the Summoner 
could show ; not only the credential of signs 
and wonders, but of teachings, which evi- 
dently inclosed far more than was apparent, 
which held out an ulterior meaning to be 
disclosed in due time ; teachings which 
penetrated to the very soul, and moved the 
heart of the age wherever they were heard. 

1 De Quincey's works, " Autobiographic 
Sketches," vol. i., p. 434. 

In a closing note to the " Supplementary Essay on 
the Essenes," he recurs to the subject again : " Metd- 
noia — which word, I contend, cannot properly be 
translated ' repenta7ice '/ for it would have been pure 
cant to suppose that age, or any age, as more under 
a summons to repentance than any other assignable. 
I understand by Metanoia a revolution of thought — 
a great intellectual change — in the accepting a new 
centre for all moral truth from Christ ; which center 
it was that subsequently caused all the offense of 
Christianity to the Roman people." 
36 



Litellectual Compass of Metdnoia. 

" Metdnoia " was the theme — "Chq pro gramma 
— projected, and everything that was after- 
wards spoken wrought out its meaning upon 
the mind of the time, sensibly or insensibly 
preparing and making ready its way. It was 
the great harbinger word of the Gospel, bear- 
ing witness to the '' Light." So, while, as 
De Quincey says, it was a prodigious assump- 
tion, the assumption of a power to work the 
most stupendous of miracles, it, at the same 
time, assumed the capacity in man to make 
the miracle possible. Christ would wait for 
the word to tell. This was His method 
throughout, even in special instances. For 
example : " Destroy this temple," said He, 
at the very outset, to those who questioned 
His authority to expel the traders, ''and in 
three days I will raise it up." It was only 
after Pentecost that the evangelist was able 
to add, " He spake of the temple of His 
body." But just as that declaration sank 
into their minds and worked unconsciously 
there — indeed, worked in the minds of some 
of them till it reappeared three years after 
as one of the taunts flung up at Him on the 
cross : " Thou that destroyest the temple, and 
buildest it in three days, save Thyself" — so 
37 



The Great Mea7iing of Metd?ioia. 

the summons to a mysterious Metanoia must 
have kept their whole consciousness thrilled 
with the sense of a strange experience, and as 
strange expectation, dumb and unintelligible, 
perhaps, but preparing the ground for what 
was to be sown in it. 

What could have helped a great scheme 
of progress better than to put a word of 
prophecy at the beginning of it ? What 
could have helped the teacher more than a 
preliminary word which was equivalent to 
an inspiration in its power to stir every fibre 
and create a boundless desire to learn and 
to know? Such an all-permeating word 
was like the slow fusion of the metal for the 
mould and the slov/ cooling of it while it was 
assuming a new form. It was proclaiming a 
Change of Mind, and creating it at the same 
moment, by drawing the subject of it into 
active and intelligent participation. 

De Quincey has given the weight of his 
authority, as a scholar, to the i7itellcctual bear- 
ing of the word " Metanoia," in the extraor- 
dinary use to which it is apphed in the New 
Testament. But he might have included in 
his statement its equal and coincident range 
38 



Litellectiial Compass of Metdnoia. 

in the sphere of the moral and affectional 
nature. Nous, as we have already said, cor- 
responds perfectly to " Mind." It allows our 
conception of an intellectual consciousness to 
let itself down into the whole possible pro- 
fundity of a spiritual consciousness. This 
is, perhaps, impKed in what he says, and it 
is as well that the stress was laid by him on 
the intellectual character of the expression, 
inasmuch as this is the very point that is 
most in danger of being lost sight of, and is 
of vast importance in any complete consid- 
eration of the subject. 

The office of the intellect in the apprehen- 
sion of divine truth is not given its due con- 
sequence. " The noetic faculty, or the faculty 
of shaping and conceiving things under their 
true relations," to use De Quincey's expres- 
sion, is foremost in all human action — it is 
first. The fact of the dependence of our 
whole nature upon it is almost too palpable 
to dwell upon, and yet the instantaneous 
flash with which outward things sometimes 
pass through it into the heart often leads us 
to ignore the office of the medium by which 
they entered. 

39 



The Great Meanitig of Metdnoia. 

Take a common instance of this uncon- 
sciousness. The hymn which, as it is sung, 
suffuses the soul with rehgious emotion has 
gone, in less than the twinkling of an eye, 
through a full and varied intellectual process 
of which the soul has taken no notice. First, 
the perception of its meaning ; next, the per- 
ception of its beauty as an expression of the 
meaning to the degree that sensibihty is ex- 
cited ; next, the susceptibihty to its musical 
rendering, which intensifies the sensibility ; 
next, the throng of associations which comes, 
partly from the memory, partly from the 
imagination, and, like the legendary angel 
of Bethesda, stirs the waters of feeling well- 
ing up beneath — these are purely intellectual. 
We are hardly aware, unless we wktch the 
mechanism of our nature, how much and 
how continually the Nous, in its primary sense, 
is occupied in conveying inspiration to the 
heart. Memory is forever pouring its store 
into this realm ; knowledge of every kind is 
daily streaming in by the portals of the senses, 
passing through the strangest transmutations 
as it is touched by the reason or the fancy, 
till it reaches the sanctuary and mounts into 
something which takes hold of the entire 
40 



Intellectual Compass of Metdnoia. 

nature. But then the first has become the 
last, and the last first. That only which 
reaches, engrosses, and moves the heart is 
that which works into the essence of the hfe ; 
and that which remains intellectual alone is 
only on the way to its practical end, an abor- 
tive thing if it gets no farther. 

The intellect may be the Beautiful Gate — 
even, Hterally, Solomon's Porch — but the 
heart is the vital centre, the Sanctuary of the 
temple. All the outer courts point towards 
this, the precinct of the spirit. It is only 
when the thoughts which throng them like the 
multitude, it is only when the purposes which 
minister in them like the priests, have actu- 
ally lit the altar -fire and gone behind the veil, 
that the divine uses of the temple are mani- 
fested and make their return. And yet it is 
none the less true that without these courts 
of approach the altar would never burn, the 
hidden power within would never be evoked. 

It is the intellect which awakens that in- 
most interior. It receives the crowd in its 
magnificent areas, it reports the situation out- 
side, and then the secret heart, brooded 
upon by the Spirit of God, takes in the situa- 
tion ; the mystic circuit is complete ; upon 
41 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

that heartfelt consciousness the character is 
formed, and upon that character the Hfe. 
It is a divine dependence ordained in the 
structure of our nature, and the process of it 
ought to be vividly before our minds if we 
would understand the operation of the Meta- 
noia. 

We have used this apostolic figure of the 
" temple of God " not only to give as graphic 
illustration as possible to a manifold fact of 
our nature under any circumstances, but also 
to consecrate the fact to the sacred relation 
in which we are discussing it, and bring it) 
besides, into the very connection in which 
St. Paul used the metaphor. 

It is only when the situation is a divine one 
that man is found to be the temple of God. 
So long as he confronts only the spirit of the 
world, whether it be in the nature of things 
or in the nature of men, he is like Herod's 
temple, without the Shechinah. He is only 
in partial use ; his true occupation is gone, 
or has not come. But when " the Lord visits 
His temple," then the wisdom of the world 
finds no longer entrance, but " the wisdom 
of God in a mystery." In that change of 
42 



Intellectual Compass of Metdnoia. 

situation comes the wondrous Change of 
Mind. 

" Eye hath not seen," exclaims the Apos- 
tle, " nor ear heard, neither have entered into 
the heart of man, the things which God hath 
prepared for them that love Him " — not in 
the next world only, but in this. " Now," he 
continues, " we have received, not the spirit 
of the world, but the Spirit which is of God ; 
that we might know the things that are freely 
given to us of God." " Know ye not that 
ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit 
of Goddwellethin you? . . . Let no man de- 
ceive himself. If any man among you seem- 
eth to be wise in this world, let him become 
a fool, that he may be wise." Such was to 
be the utter dispossession of himself, such the 
utter evacuation of the wisdom of the world, 
such the Metanoia, when he came to know 
" Christ the power of God, and the wisdom 
of Godr 

St. Paul, when charged with a message like 
this, may well have scorned to come with the 
" excellency of speech or of wisdom " which 
then captivated the imagination of men ; but 
no man ever Hved who, " in demonstration of 
the Spirit and of power," made a greater ap- 
43 



The Great Meaning of Metdfioia. 

peal to the intellect, more riveted the intelli- 
gent attention of the world, and more elicited 
the admiration of the finest intellects the 
world has known. If ever a man was chosen 
because of his intellectual power, and if ever 
a man appealed to the understanding and 
struck home through every faculty and intui- 
tion which the understanding could summon, 
it was he. 



44 



IV. 



THE INAUGURAL ACTION OF METANOIA IN 
THE FIRST AGE. 

If we have made our meaning clear — and 
much that we have said has an ulterior refer- 
ence which will make it clearer — the reader is 
now prepared to take up the historic moment 
when the gospel was inaugurated, and to 
contemplate the stupendous change of out- 
ward situation which then ensued. 

What an epoch it was! What a meaning 
lay in the Metanoia that was then proclaimed ! 
" The noetic faculty, or the faculty of shap- 
ing and conceiving things under their true 
relations," entered now upon its work, and 
the issue was to be a revolution in the whole 
human conception of hfe. Christ substituted 
His own wisdom for the wisdom of the 
world, and what we see recorded in the New 
Testament is, first, the natural process of the 
45 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

Metanoia — this wisdom working through the 
intelHgence upon the heart, the conscience, 
and the hfe ; and, next, the thoroughness of 
the result in forming a new spiritual con- 
sciousness in that age.^ 

It was, indeed, the "beginning of mira- 
cles " : the water was turned into wine. What 
else could have taken place from His pres- 
ence at the bridal where heaven and earth 
were made one? The change was now in- 
evitable from the lower into the higher, from 
the temporal into the eternal, from the natural 
into the spiritual, from the human into the 
divine. Life took a new character and an- 
other meaning when He drew near. It was 
found to be His life. The letter of the Old 
Testament dissolved into the spirit of the 
New. The law disappeared, and the right- 
eousness which is by faith, red as the blood 
of a great Sacrifice, was found instead, filling 
the vessels of human purification to the brim. 
The good wine had been kept until now! 

Did ever the world see so mighty and so 
radical a revolution as came upon it then? 

1 See Matthew Arnold's view of " Metanoia " in a 
note at the end of the Essay. 
46 



Inaugural Action of Metdnoia in the First Age. 

Judaism gave way to a universal religion. 
The Mosaic night broke into the dawn of 
the perfect day. The P'atherhood of God 
was revealed to all men, and a brotherhood 
with the Son of God! Now were they the 
sons of God ! partakers of the divine nature ! 
This world was discovered to be within the 
boundaries of the other world, and death 
was merged into a resurrection of the dead! 
Righteousness and truth were to prevail, for 
the power of sin had been destroyed! And 
the efficacy of all this lay in the person of the 
Christ. It was He who gave all this Hght. 
The order of human Hfe reversed itself in 
Him. All conduct was to flow from a spirit 
within, not by a law without. Selfishness 
was turned into self-surrender and self-sacri- 
fice. The affections were to be set upon 
things above, not on things on the earth. 
The spirit was everything, the flesh profited 
nothing. In all human action was to be the 
consciousness of Eternity ; in all intercourse 
of man with man no less than the magna- 
nimity of God. 

As we said in the beginning, what strikes 
us first, as we open our New Testament, is 
47 



The Great Meajiing of Metdjioia, 

the commanding position in which we find 
the word " Metanoia." It is the great initia- 
tory word of the first three gospels. How- 
ever they may vary in the way they begin the 
story, they unite in the way they introduce 
this. The summons to mankind, first by the 
Baptist, next by the Christ, is to a Metanoia 
— a Change of Mind. And when we come 
to the fourth gospel, with its interior view of 
the hfe of Christ, it is to discover '' Metanoia" 
also at the very outset, but in another form : 
in an expression which, characteristically of 
that gospel, carries us into the very depths 
of the selfsame idea. 

Let us combine the four accounts. Now 
we shall see it in its true perspective ; that 
is, successively in its intellectual, ethical, and 
spiritual development. 

In the very beginning we have the Christ, 
half philosophically, half spiritually depicted 
as the " Logos," the ** Word " ; then as the 
" Light of men." What greater implication 
could there be that Christianity was directed 
through the understanding to the heart? 
Next, John the Baptist is spoken of as the 
48 



Inaugural Action of Meidnoia i?i the First Age. 

"witness" to this Light. He was to ''go before 
the face of the Lord to prepare His way." 
The method of his preparation was to pro- 
duce, first, a powerful, controUing impression 
upon the intelligence of the people. His per- 
sonal appearance, his clothing like that of an 
ancient prophet, his ascetic look, his secluded 
life, the "voice," out of Isaiah, with which 
he spoke, the burden of his first announce- 
ment — all were in keeping, and were calcu- 
lated to rouse the whole nation. The past 
came vividly back to their memory; the 
future was as vividly, though mysteriously 
and presagingly, brought to their imagina- 
tion. He came "proclaiming a Baptism of 
Metanoia unto sending away ^ of sins." His 
vocal summons was that of a herald. " Meta- 
noeite ! Take a New Mind upon you : for the 

1 z\q a(p£acv, dphesis, a sending away, a letting go, 
a setting free. The Latin "remission," a sending 
back, as used in the English versions, savors too 
much of a lettmg off, and is too evidently a render- 
ing colored by its association with the punitive ele- 
ment in repentance. Metanoia is * * unto the sending 
awayof sins." That is, its natural effect is to set the 
soul free from the bondage of the disposition to sin. 

But Christ, in creating the Metanoia, takes away 
sin. It is His personal work. 
49 



The Great Meaning of Mefdnoia. 

Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." And, as if 
his '' voice " were not enough, he spoke also by 
this symbol whose meaning must have been 
universally understood to be a change from 
an old condition into a new, even such a 
change, as they esteemed it, as that from 
dark paganism to glorious Judaism. It now 
meant a change from dark Judaism to some 
far exceeding glory. It meant a change that 
would really, not typically, bring with it a 
sending away of sins. He thus expressively 
coupled this sign of a Change of Condition 
with his summons to a Change of Mind. It 
was no other than " a Baptism of Metanoia." 

His summons of the Pharisees and Saddu- 
cees to a Change of Mind was as revolution- 
ary and as radical as it well could be. In 
this he struck right at their views. He broke 
their illusions. "Think not to say within 
yourselves, We have Abraham to our father : 
for I say unto you. That God is able of these 
stones to raise up children unto Abraham. 
Even now the ax is lying at the root of the 
trees." There must be fruit worthy of the 
Metanoia {rrig fieravoiag). 

The effect of these utterances upon the 
people was as distinctly intellectual as it 
50 



hiaugural Action of Metdnoia in the First Age, 

was emotional. Their whole intelligence was 
roused to such a degree that they not only 
went down into the Baptism and sought prac- 
tical counsel for their future lives, but they 
were thrown into a state of "expectation." 
They were excited to inquiry. "All men 
reasoned in their hearts of John, whether 
he were the Christ, or not." Finally priests 
and Levites came down from Jerusalem to 
ask him, " Who art thou ? that we may give 
an answer to them that sent us. What say- 
est thou of thyself ? " 

Up to a certain point he had not an- 
nounced the Christ, but he had awakened 
every thought and association which could 
suggest Him. He would seem to have gath- 
ered this intense concentration of attention 
upon himself in order to acquire additional 
power in portraying the greater grandeur of 
Him who was coming. 

He made himself the dark background of 
the picture he now drew. He himself was 
but a voice. " One mightier than I cometh." 
He himself was not worthy to stoop down 
and unlace His sandals. " I indeed bap- 
tize you in water ; but He shall baptize you 
51 



TJie Great Meanifig of Metdfioia. 

in the Holy Spirit and fire." He is the real 
Baptizer; the Metanoia that is to come by 
Him is to come through the Spirit of God, 
and something more potent than water. 
With Him that Baptism and the Metanoia 
are one. ''What I am, what I teach, what 
I summon you to, what I baptize in, are but 
foreshadows of Him." 

Powerful as was this picture, John drew 
still another. It was based upon a famihar 
scene in their every-day life. This Coming 
One was the gi-eat Harvester, whose win- 
nowing-fork should stir humanity to its 
depths, as so much grain on the threshing- 
floor, and throw it against the currents of the 
Spirit. The wheat would fall at His feet and 
go into His garner, but the stubble would fly 
beyond Him to become only fuel for fire. 

He painted these two strong pictures upon 
their imaginations — pictures whose parabolic 
force would sink profoundly into their minds. 
Vague conceptions were they as yet — as 
vague as the idea of a Metanoia itself must 
have been — but there was a far-reaching sig- 
nificance in them which, as now united with 
the call to a Change of Mind, time would 
reveal and the reality would confirm. 
52 



Inaugural Action of Metdnoia in the First Age. 

The seed of much thinking was sown, and 
a kind of thinking that was sure to work its 
way into the hfe. 

It was not until after all this ; not until 
Jesus had come and been baptized ; not, in- 
deed, until He had returned to him after the 
temptation in the wilderness — that John made 
known the fact that his own Baptism had 
had a still deeper purpose than had yet been 
suspected. Not only was it a sign of the 
Metanoia in view of the impending Change, 
not only did it convey a typical intimation 
of Him who should bring about this Change, 
but it had all along been the designed occa- 
sion when the Christ Himself, in bodily pres- 
ence, should be made known. 

John had been utterly in the dark as to 
who He was. He had been in even a greater 
state of expectation than the people. All he 
knew was that '' He that sent him to baptize 
in water, the same had said to him, Upon 
whomsoever thou shalt see the Spirit descend- 
ing, and remaining upon Him, the same is 
He who baptizeth in the Holy Spirit." " I 
knew Him not," he said afterwards ; " but in 
order that \^ivd\ He should be made manifest 
53 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

unto Israel, for this cause came I \6ia rovro 
TjXOov eyd] baptizing in water." 

This remarkable statement cannot be too 
strongly reiterated in view of the significance 
we may attach to it. The symbol, Baptism, 
was put into John's hands not only, as we 
say, to express the impending Metanoia, the 
Change of Mind to which the people were 
summoned, but also to be the means by 
which the Christ, the consummate Agent of 
it all, should be made known to John him- 
self and to the people. Everything was in 
suspense until this supreme moment of per- 
ception, knowledge, realization, came. The 
Metanoia was not at the full until He was 
" made manifest." 

The fact further defines the word. John's 
own Mind was waiting to be informed. The 
Mind of Israel was waiting to be informed. 
Both were yet in the Pronoia. They were 
in the line of that information, but the know- 
ledge had not come. They stood on the 
verge of the Metanoia. When it should dawn 
it would affect every Mind according to its 
previous condition. The Change would be 
either an evolution or a revolution; but in 
54 



Inaugural Action of Metdftoia in the First Age, 

either case it would be a Change of Mind, 
an advance into a new stage of conscious- 
ness, a confirmation of what had already been 
dimly discerned, or a contradiction of what 
had hitherto been wrongly imagined. The 
one was John's position, ready for any de- 
velopment ; the other, in different degrees 
and forms, was the position of the people. 

Let it still be borne in mind that this was 
known as " a Baptism of Metanoia." Now 
Jesus Himself was to enter the rite. If it 
were '' the Baptism of repentance, ^^ as it is ren- 
dered, why was He there ? What had it to 
do with Him, or He with it? This has been 
the puzzle of theologians, who labor under the 
prepossession of the old rendering. But that 
He should participate in and be the central 
glory of "a Baptism of a Change of Mind," in 
the large sense in which we understand that 
expression, would be sublimely consistent with 
His character as the Christ; and it would, 
moreover, give us an inner glimpse of His life, 
which would ally it still more with our own. 

We have reason to think that Jesus Him- 
self was in the background with the others, 
55 



The Great Meafiing of Metdnoia. 

personally known to John, yet spiritually un- 
known to him ; personally known to many, 
yet spiritually undiscerned by them ; person- 
ally known to Himself in the deepest con- 
sciousness of what He might be, perceiving 
in Himself all the marks of the Christ, yet 
with that consciousness awaiting the seal of 
the divine confirmation. Israel, John, Jesus, 
were all, in these different degrees, in the 
Pronoia — the Mind before it had crossed 
into perfect intelHgence. The " Baptism of 
Metanoia " was therefore to be the manifesta- 
tion of Christ to Himself as well as to them.^ 
The event declares this to be the very fact. 
"When all the people had been baptized," 
then He also entered by the selfsame heaven- 
appointed gate — it was "of heaven," not "of 
men" — into the new order of things: the 
Kingdom of Heaven which was at hand. What 

1 Was there no meaning in the event when, after 
three years of this transfiguring experience, suddenly 
" the fashion of His countenance was altered, and 
His face did shine as the sun," to a group of His 
disciples on the mount, and the divine w^ords uttered 
at His Baptism were uttered again? Was there no 
meaning in it when the whole truth and reality of 
that vision of a change burst upon all of them in His 
resurrection from the dead? 
56 



Inaugural Action of Metdnoia in the First Age. 

happened ? As He came up out of the water 
the heavens were rent asunder, "and lo, a 
voice from heaven, saying, Thou art — this 
is — My beloved Son, in whom I am well 
pleased." '* And I saw," said John, " and 
bare record that this is the Son of God." ^ 

What a Metanoia was there, to both Jesus 
and John ! The Pronoia was over with both ! 
The boundary had been crossed; the veil 
had been lifted. The whole great advance 
had been made in a moment of time. Jesus, 
filled with the immensity of a now confirmed 
consciousness, " filled with the Spirit," went 
into the wilderness to breast the trial which 



1 " By this anointing of the Spirit," says 01s- 
hausen, ' ' the gradual development of the human 
consciousness in Jesus attained its height. . . . The 
Baptism, accordingly, was the sublime season when 
the character of the XP'^'^'^^^^ which was dormant in 
the gradually developing child and youth, now came 
forth and expanded itself. Compare the remarkable 
words in Justin, ' Dial. Tryph. cum Jud.,' p. 226: 
* Though the Messiah has been born and lives. He 
is unknown, and does not even know Himself, nor 
has any power, until Elias shall come and anoint Him 
and make Him known to all.' " (Olshausen's "Com- 
mentary on the New Testament," vol. i., p. 271.) 
57 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

should come to Him as the announced Son 
of God. John emerged from the wilderness 
into the full light of the same Metanoia, 
into the blaze of the very consummation 
amid which he was to wane out of sight, to 
await the return of Jesus, and to say, '' Be- 
hold the Lamb of God! This is He of 
whom I spake." 

And what a Metanoia had come, also, 
upon the disciples of John and upon Israel! 
With Jesus and with John the Change of 
Mind, as we say, was in the form of devel- 
opment, an evolution from one state of con- 
sciousness into another. But upon Israel it 
had come hke a Change from darkness to 
light, from ignorance to knowledge, a revo- 
lution of consciousness, an inversion, as time 
went on, of all that they had ever thought 
or beheved or felt. 

But let us return to the great final scene 
at the Baptism, which shed its splendor over 
the rite. 

The virtue never left it which entered it 

then. Henceforth it was consecrated into 

a sacrament, forever allied with a Change of 

Mind and of Life. Baptism, as it once de- 

58 



Inaugural Action of Metdnoia i7i the First Age. 

fined the Metanoia, was always to define it. 
For go now from the first three gospels into 
the fourth. What do we find there — also in 
the outset of the record? We hear our Lord 
discoursing of a New Birth — a birth from 
Above (dvcdOev), a birth of the Spirit, and 
this as accompanying a birth of water! 

Even as it had been with the Master, so 
was'it to be with the disciple. The full reve- 
lation of sonship in God was to break upon 
/lim, also, after he had ascended through the 
outward rite. Then the Spirit would meet 
the Mind openly, and renew it day by day. 
It also was to Change as it learned, as it was 
tempted, and as it suiTered. 

Where is the harmony of the gospels, where 
is the harmony of the Gospel itself, unless the 
'' Baptism of Metanoia " proclaimed by John 
the Baptist to the people was the same as the 
" born of water and of the Spirit " announced 
by Jesus to Nicodemus? 

So here, in the profoundest of the gospels, 
we have the profoundest exposition of the 
word. 



59 



V. 



METANOIA THE METHOD OF CHRIST'S 
TEACHING. 

We are now fairly brought to the moment 
when Jesus Himself began to proclaim and 
to say, "The time is fulfilled, and the King- 
dom of God is at hand : Metanoeite ! Take 
upon you a New Mind, and Believe the Glad 
Tidings." 

What a new and concentrated light falls 
upon the life of Christ if we look upon it as 
the process or action of creating the Meta- 
noia! With this single idea in view His 
whole method comes definitely before us. It 
was all comprised in the terms of the above 
announcement: "The divine epoch of the 
world has come! God is now to reign on 
earth! Heaven is all about you! Sin, sor- 
row, death, are no more! Peace, joy, eter- 
nal life, are yours ! The night is far spent ; 
60 



Metanoia the Method of ChrisVs Teaching, 

the day is at hand. Awake, awake! All 
is changed! Change ye! Believe not the 
world ; believe Me.' I bring you good tid- 
ings of great joy!" 

Supernatural as this revelation was, it was, 
Hke Him who brought it, subject to the order 
of nature in human nature when delivered 
to mankind. That order, as we have said, 
is this : all inward '' change " proceeds from 
outward " change." A change of outward 
situation induces a change of mental con- 
sciousness ; a change of mental consciousness 
induces a change of moral disposition; a 
change of moral disposition induces a change 
of outward life. Give a man a new con- 
sciousness a?td he will develop a new nature. 

Upon this natural order of the Metanoia 
did Christ proceed. He first revealed a 
change of circumstance. He filled the soul 
with knowledge altogether new. He com- 
municated to it ideas and inspired it with 
principles which brought about it the horizon 
of another world. Then, step by step, came 
the dispossession of the old nature till it had 
reached the vital center, the seat of the con- 
science and the will, and then, step by step, 
6i 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

the moral transformation began. It was " the 
expulsive power of a new affection." The 
" world " was cast out like a deaf and blind 
spirit, and the once divine heart was left 
cleansed and free. And this was done, as 
we say, by occupying, first, the intellectual 
nature of man, by engaging the whole power 
of his understanding with the Truth. But the 
nature of that truth was such that it struck 
through to the heart ; for " truth " and " right- 
eousness," in His mouth, meant the same 
thing. Like the hymn we hear, the intellec- 
tual process, however full, was unnoticed in 
the greater fullness of the spiritual impression 
produced. It came from Him on fire with 
the vividness of His own consciousness, and 
its illumination, as well as its inspiration, was 
thrown through these out-looking windows 
into the inmost chambers of the spirit. But 
these intellectual windows were the first to 
blaze under the light that poured into them. 
His opening summons to the Metanoia was 
addressed to the intelligence, and without 
an awakened intelligence it could not have 
moved the people as it did. All His subse- 
quent preaching then became an education, 
an education by gradual revelation. He was 
62 



Meta7ioia the Method of Christ's Teaching. 

known as the " Teacher." He called His fol- 
lowers His '' disciples " — learners. " Every 
one," He said, ''that hath learned of the 
Father cometh unto Me." " Hearken unto Me 
every one of you, and understand." " Per- 
ceive ye not, neither understand? " "All things 
that I have heard of My Father I have made 
known unto you." His constant formula 
was, " He that hath ears to hear, let him 
hear ! " which applied as much to the inter- 
est felt by the intelHgence as to the disposi- 
tion that lay in the will. 

His mode of teaching involved almost 
every form of arresting attention and pro- 
ducing an impression. 

He portrayed the Kingdom of Heaven 
in parables of the most diverse description ; 
some so plain as to clear up a whole situa- 
tion ; some so obscure as to hold in reserve 
a lesson, of which time would develop the 
meaning; some with intimations so vast, so 
stupendous, that the heaven and the earth 
seemed passing away. 

He spoke, sometimes, in startling enigmas 
which roused thought, conjecture, specula- 
tion, inquiry; sometimes in language as 
63 



The Great Meafiifig of Metdnoia. 

startling for its hyperbole, in order to vivify 
to the utmost an essential truth ; sometimes, 
again, in precepts so plain that the very chil- 
dren could understand them. 

Sometimes He spoke in statements which, 
like those to the woman of Samaria, widened 
as into infinitude the local horizon about 
Mount Gerizim or Jerusalem; which, like 
those in the Sermon on the Mount, revealed 
the divine profundities under the law and 
under all human life. 

He employed reasoning and argument. 
He appealed to the imagination ; He struck 
indeHble pictures upon the memory. 

He was ever speaking of the "Truth." 
Even at the last He declared to Pilate that 
" to this end was He born, and for this cause 
came He into the world, that He should 
bear wu'tness unto the Truth." 

His whole endeavor seemed to be to de- 
velop the capacity for Behef ; and when it 
was developed it took the mental-ethical- 
spiritual name of " Faith " — another Greek 
word elevated into a transcendental mean- 
ing, and expressing the idea of Metanoia in 
its highest, most concentrated, most effectual 
form. 

64 



Metanoia the Method of Chrisfs Teaching. 

He used every credential which He 
brought with Him to fasten His personahty 
upon the age, and to make Himself a vivid 
and memorable, as well as a lovable, pres- 
ence forever. Every sign and wonder was 
worked as much to prove His origin and 
authority as to express His loving-kindness 
and tender mercy. 

He was the Sower who went out to sow. 
He left in that soil principles working, ideas 
germinating, thoughts springing, as well as 
feelings moved and affections stirred, the is- 
sues of which that soil very imperfectly com- 
prehended until the ripening moment had 
come. 

He threw a mystical shadow over life which 
was to deepen into an eclipse of all that was 
earthly. He set forward the boundaries of 
this world into the other world, and brought 
into this Hfe the spirit of the heavenly hfe, the 
spirit of eternity amid things temporal. He 
revealed the existence of the absolute Right, 
the near presence of the love and of the will 
of God. 

With His disciples it was a constant, a 
growing Metanoia. At first they were full 
65 



The Great Meafimg of Metdfioia. 

of joy, of anticipation, of triumph. They 
were not to fast: the Bridegroom was with 
them. The sombre word " repenta?ice " were 
sadly inadequate to express all that He had 
created. Doubtless, here and there, some, 
like Peter, astonished by this exhibition of 
power, fell down at His knees, saying, "De- 
part from me ; for I am a sinful man, O 
Lord;" or some, like Zaccheus, also power- 
fully impressed, offered the fullest reparation 
for an evil life ; or some, hke the woman that 
was a sinner, loved much because they had 
been forgiven much. Such results were the 
inevitable, as they were the designed, conse- 
quence of His personal influence, and, sooner 
or later, they were to come upon all. But 
the influence bega7i in the intellect awakened ; 
the intellect overwhelmed with a new percep- 
tion, which grew into a new conviction, into 
a belief in His authority, and a belief in 
what He revealed. 

And, as if to indicate to His disciples that 
the Metanoia was even then by no means 
complete. He told them at the close that 
" He had yet many things to say unto them, 
but that they could not bear them now. 
Howbeit when He, the Spirit of Truth, 
66 



Metanoia the Method of Christ's Teaching. 

should come, He would guide them into all 
Truth." "He should bring all things to 
their remembrance^ whatsoever He Himself 
had said unto them." 

And, indeed, the Metanoia had not fully 
come. So little had they comprehended, so 
much in them still lay latent, that His death 
was a catastrophe which ended all their 
hope. Their Metanoia entered upon a new 
stage when He rose from the dead. Their 
''sorrow was turned into joy," as He had 
predicted. But even then the consummate 
hour had not come, and even then they 
could not have fully taken in His last in- 
junction " that Metanoia unto sending away 
of sins should be proclaimed in His name," 
that they should "go and make learners of 
all the nations, Baptizing them in the name 
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the 
Holy Spirit." 

The Metanoia was not complete until the 
hour when the prophecy of John the Baptist 
was literally fulfilled ; until the Christ Himself 
was, so to speak, complete; until He came 
again, "Baptizing them in the Holy Spirit 
67 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

and fire ; " until, as the great Harvester, 
He thrust His winnowing-fork into the har- 
vest He had planted, and cast it against the 
wind of that Spirit, thoroughly to purge His 
floor. 

Then, in the outburst of that mighty wind, 
came the Metanoia complete — complete so 
far as it was an instant realization — upon the 
disciples, upon the age. The whole original 
impression of Him revived, and a deeper 
than that impression was inspired. The 
world went into shadow. The Kingdom of 
Heaven was on earth. They had " the Mind 
of Christ." 

But what was its first manifestation? A 
pubHc phenomenon on the day of Pentecost. 
There was a vocal outburst of divine ecstasy. 
Whether they spoke in languages or in mys- 
tical utterances, it was the release of their 
pent-up souls when the full realization came 
upon them. 

The multitude cried in wonder, as they 
saw and heard, '' What meaneth this ? " or 
in mockery, "These men are full of new 
wine!" Their amazement and skepticism 
were equally met by an illuminating speech 
from Peter : a statement of facts, an argument 
68 



Metanoia the Method of Chrisfs Teachi?ig. 

from prophecy, irresistibly concentrated upon 
the event which had shaken Jerusalem fifty 
days before ; a speech which leaped from the 
supreme Metanoia of the moment and carried 
all its impalpable power into the minds before 
him. The same Hght then broke upon them. 

" Men! brethren! " they exclaimed, " what 
shall we do? " — the very words of the multi- 
tudes to John the Baptist when all this was 
foreshadowed; and then they heard again 
the burden of the Baptist and of the Christ : 
'' Meravoriaarel Take a New Mind, and 
be Baptized every one of you in the name 
of Jesus Christ." 

The same thing occurred when, shortly 
afterwards, a miracle was performed. There 
was another convincing statement, with the 
same exhortation. Observe the antithesis : 

"I wot that through ignorance [ayvoiav] 
ye did it. . . . lAeravoriGarel Take a New 
Mind therefore, and be converted, that your 
sins may be blotted out, so that [ottw^] times 
of refreshing may come from the presence 
of the Lord." 

How little the repent of our version 
takes in the compass of the counsel ! They 
had repented already, in the usual sense ; 
69 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

they were ^tt^ly penitent, they were ''pricked 
to the heart." But Peter made them under- 
stand that compunction or any other like 
feeling was not all. Their Minds must seize 
the new situation, so that God might send 
Him who was before proclaimed to them^ 
Jesus Christ. They were to turn from igno- 
rance to knowledge. 



70 



VI. 



THE METANOIA OF ST. PAUL FAITH AND 

RENEWAL. 

And now one other stage, which will carry 
us even deeper into the Scriptural aspect of 
this subject. 

If ever there was an instance of Metanoia 
under all the conditions which could exhibit 
the fullest import of the word it was that of 
what is inadequately called the" conversion " 
of St. Paul. 

It would almost seem as if the Change of 
Mind in a man of such personal greatness, 
moral strength, and conspicuous record had 
been brought about in the sudden, pubhc way 
it was in order to put into a concentrated 
form, and reveal on the grandest scale, a pro- 
cess and a fact which in ordinary cases could 
not be so visibly represented. We have here 
71 



The Great Mea7iing of Metdfwia. 

in colossal proportions, and, potentially, in a 
moment of time, the Metanoia of which all 
Christian experience is made. That such a 
thing could and did take place in the case of 
a man of this intelligence has been cited as 
one of the strongest evidences of the Christian 
religion. What he was before the Change 
we know: 

First of all, one of the most richly endowed 
intellects and one of the most powerful na- 
tures ever known among men. Following 
upon that, intensified by his proud Judaism, 
by his narrow Pharisaism, by his profound 
knowledge of Jewish law and traditions, by 
his devotion to the religion of his fathers, he 
turned out a zealot in the cause of Judaism, 
so dark, bigoted, and bloody as to make him 
a leader in the persecution of the new faith. 
He had proved impenetrable to the story 
and teaching of Jesus, to the accounts of 
His miracles, even to the signs and wonders 
wrought in His name by the apostles. 

But in the very hour when his Mind was 
most turbulent, vengeful, and determined, 
Jesus meets him in the way. As soon as the 
conviction of his error had broken upon his 
Mind, as visibly as the great light which had 
72 



The Metanoia of St. Paul. 



blinded his eyes, his iirst inquiry was, like all 
previous disciples, ''What must I do? " 

'' I have appeared unto thee for this pur- 
pose," answered Jesus, "to make thee a 
minister and a witness both of these things 
which thou, hast seen, and of those things in 
the which I will appear unto thee; delivering 
thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, 
unto whom now I send thee, to open their 
eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light. ^^ 

" Whereupon," St. Paul says, " I was not 
disobedient unto the heavenly vision; but 
showed unto them that they should Take 
upon them a New Mind [jieTavoe'lv^ and turn 
to God, and do works worthy of the Meta- 
noia \a^La rrjg jLteravoia^]." 

When the scales had fallen from his eyes 
his Mind beheld no other vision than of 
Christ. He that had then met him was 
thenceforth ever before him. The narrow, 
prejudiced, sectarian Pharisee was "changed " 
into an apostle of Christianity so magnifi- 
cent, so enlightened, so large and Hberal in 
his conception of it, that none of his new 
brethren could keep pace with him, as even 
all present ecclesiasticism is in danger of 
falling behind him. 

73 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

All the marks of the Metanoia are here : 

It was the Mind changed through circum- 
stance ; for when he beheld the supernatural 
presence of the Lord, as actually risen from 
the dead, the whole vision of his error bui'st 
upon him. 

It was the Mind changed in understand- 
ing; for he spent three years of soHtude in 
Arabia, receiving the fullest indoctrination 
from Christ. 

It was the Mind changed by evolution ; 
for, with the root of the matter in him, he 
now grasped entirely the transcendent change 
of situation, and came forth able, above all 
others, to reconcile the old economy with the 
new, to proclaim the advanced principles of 
the Gospel with a profundity of spiritual dis- 
cernment which no one should ever exceed, 
and to be the most powerful advocate Chris- 
tianity should ever know. 

It was the Mind changed in disposition; 
for, from the fierce, proud, intolerant, self-suf- 
ficient son of the law, he became the patient, 
humble, compassionate, affectionate servant 
of Christ, " all things to all men." 

It was the Mind changed by development ; 
for the same capacity for faith, for zeal, for 
74 



The Metanoia of St. Paul. 



force and energy, for religious devotion, was 
now carried over and enlarged in the interest 
of a cause as new and as vast as the whole 
just revealed purpose of God in man. 

It was the Mind changed by revolution ; 
for it was a revolt from Judaism in its nar- 
row rabbinical form, a total break with the 
artificial, superstitious, selfish system under 
which he had been born and bred, and a 
leap into the large spiritual consciousness of 
Christ Himself. 

It was the Mind changed before repen- 
tance set in, which repentance accompanied, 
which repentance intensified, which repe7ttance 
helped to fill with a due apprehension of the 
cross, but of the extent of whose growth in 
its change, of the extent of whose apprehen- 
sion of his Lord, the word '^ repentance''^ in 
its fullest theological acceptation could never 
follow, compass, or describe. Nothing less 
than the word " Metanoia " — or some Eng- 
lish expression that shall be the full equiva- 
lent of the word — can compass or describe 
it. For what was its most conspicuous, 
foremost feature ? A profoundly illumi- 
nated intelligence followed by a nature as 
profoundly penetrated. The " spiritual man " 
75 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

was there ; the " natural man " was there no 
longer. 

In the hght of this word even the most 
unspiritual mind cannot fail in some degree 
of sympathy with St. Paul's enthusiasm in 
his work, or to understand the ecstasy with 
which he regarded the person of his Lord, or 
to know what he meant when he said that 
his "conversation," his daily hfe, was lived 
in heaven. The spiritual, so far as this, 
takes the look of the natural. 

When we open his epistles and read them 
from this point of view, with this word as their 
key, they all — no matter what their occasion 
or what themes they passingly treat — take the 
character of the summons to the Metanoia. 
Back to this, in some form, they always come. 
He rings, as we said, endless changes upon 
the word. The thought of it appears in in- 
numerable forms of expression. It would be 
one prolonged and many-sided illustration of 
the idea if we were to quote from him as pro- 
fusely as we would like. But our space will 
permit only a selection of a few passages 
where the most direct reference is made, and 
where the " noetic faculty " is also implied. 

He said to the Romans: "Be not con- 
76 



The Metanoia of St. Paul. 



formed to this world : but be ye Transformed 
by the Renewing of the Mind [^erafiopcpovGde 
ri[j, avaicaivcjaai rov voogy Rom. xii. 2]." 

He said to the Corinthians : " We have the 
Mind [vovv] of Christ (i Cor. ii. 16). . . . 
We all . . . are Transformed into the same 
image from glory to glory, even as by the 
Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor. iii. 18). . . . If 
any man be in Christ, he is a New Creature : 
old things are passed away ; behold, all things 
are become New" (2 Cor. v. 17). 

He said to the Ephesians: "That . . . 
God. . . . may give unto you a spirit of Wis- 
dom [ao(ptag] and Revelation in the Know- 
ledge [ETrtyv6aet] of Him [Christ] : the eyes of 
your heart being Enlightened ; that ye may 
know," etc. (Eph. i. 17, 18); "Henceforth 
walk not as the Gentiles also walk, in the van- 
ity of their Mind [i^oof], having the Under- 
standing [r^ diavoia] darkened, being alien- 
ated from the life of God through the Igno- 
rance [dyvoiav] that is in them. . . . But 
ye have not so Learned Christ ; if so be that 
ye have heard Him, and have been Taught 
in Him, even as Truth is in Jesus: that ye 
put off concerning the former manner of life, 
the old man ; . . . and be Renewed in the 



77 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

spirit of your Mind [roos] ; and that ye put 
on the New Man" (Eph. iv. 18-24). 

He said to the Colossians : '' Seeing that 
ye have put off the old man with his deeds ; 
and have put on the New Man, which is Re- 
newed in Knowledge after the image of Him 
that created him" (Col. iii. 9, 10). 

He said to Timothy : * ' The servant of the 
Lord must . . . be . . . apt to Teach, pa- 
tient ; in meekness instructing those that op- 
pose themselves; if God peradventure will 
give them Metanoia unto Knowledge \dq 
imyvidoiv\ of the Truth" (2 Tim. ii. 24, 25). 

But we must now pass on to an occasion 
in which he used the word itself, and by force 
of circumstances less in a spiritual than in an 
intellectual and popular sense. 

When he confronted the Stoics and Epi- 
cureans in the Areopagus, roused to indig- 
nation by the evidences of image-worship 
around him, and to quick perception of the 
opportunity offered him by an altar to an 
Unknown God — to him so near in associa- 
tion with the Unnamed God of his own peo- 
ple, but to them only, at the most, a philo- 
sophical dream — when, incoming before such 
78 



The Metanoia of St. Paul. 



an audience, he had to burn his Hebrew ships, 
for he could beat no retreat upon the tradi- 
tions of his own reHgion, quote no Scriptures 
but those of their own poets, and reason with 
them only upon their ow^n premises; when, 
if he spoke at all, he must speak to the in- 
tellect, and to an intellect which would care 
very little for an appeal to the heart, and 
not even understand an allusion to " sin " as 
a moral alienation; when all his tact and 
ingenuity were exerted to get uninterrupted 
to the " new thing " they desired to hear and 
he wished to announce ; when he had stated 
the nature of the one living and true God in 
a way to command their respect, and in a 
way to enlarge their conception of Him who 
should remain no longer " Unknown," if he 
could reveal Him to their understanding — 
what did he say? " The times of Ignorance 
therefore God overlooked ; but now he com- 
m^andeth men that they should all everywhere 
Change their Mind \^\EravoElv\ ; " namely, 
unto the Knowledge of One who was to 
''judge the world in righteousness." 

Without question St. Paul spoke as near as 
he could to the sense of classic Greek under 
such Attic circumstances, and we are not jus- 
79 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

tified in here interpreting the word in any 
other way. He could not have expected 
them to put the full construction upon it 
which lay in his own mind, and with which 
it must have vaguely rung in their ears as it 
came forth with the tone of his own intense 
consciousness. All that they could have 
understood was an appeal to " change their 
views " ; to come to a conception of the 
Divine Nature more worthy of those who were 
" the offspring of God " ; to accept this great 
" knowledge " which he now communicated 
in place of the '* ignorance " which their altar 
confessed. The very most that their usage 
could admit into the word he had employed 
was an ethical import, sometimes, though 
rarely, attached to it ; but it must have been 
in this instance very dimly discerned, if at all. 
If there was anything like "regret" to be 
felt, it was, most probably, only displeasure 
with themselves that they should have been 
so mistaken. Certainly nothing so strong as 
penitence could have been dreamed of by St. 
Paul. He was intent upon something be- 
yond, to which the intellectual impression or 
emotion he had created would be a stepping- 
stone, namely, "the Man whom God had 
80 



The Metanoia of St, Paul, 



ordained " — the Christ. For this, and up to 
this, he would " Change their Mind." ^ 

How utterly inconceivable, at any rate, 
is a call to repentance^ as it is translated in 
our version, both the Old and the New, in 
the connection of such an attempt to com- 
mend the revelation he proclaimed to the con- 
fidence and respect of these speculative men ! 

We must leave to the reader the further 
examination of passages in the New Testa- 
ment where '' Metanoia " in some form ap- 
pears, and is still rendered ^'repentance'''' in 
the New Version. Here they all are in a 
foot-note, and he can judge for himself 
whether, in every case (and in some cases 
most expressly), a more distinct reference to 
the Changed Mind^ in the profound sense we 
have given the phrase, would not be an im- 
provement upon the more emotional and less 
fruitful idea suggested by the word '^ repen- 
tance'^ It will be found used, in many of 
these instances, not in a general, but in a 

1 There is an appositeness between the inscription 
ArNi22Ti2 eEi2 in the beginning of the speech, and 
the expressions ayvoiaq and fieravoelv at the end, which 
is very significant. 

8i 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

special application, when its great meaning 
is curdled, as it were, into the expression of 
a single feeling repellent of sin under the 
revelation of righteousness; when thought, 
perception, knowledge, conscience, penitence, 
and the will are combined into such a strong 
revolt of the entire man from an evil course 
as to change the character of his life. A 
rendering which keeps any of these powerful 
and necessary elements out of sight is more 
than an unfortunate one.i 

1 According to the text of Westcott and Hort, 
This text has been followed elsewhere in this edition 
of the essay when there has been a departure from the 
Authorized Version. 

Meravofw: Matt. iii. 2, iv. 17, xi. 20, 21, xii. 41 ; 
Mark i. 15, vi. 12; Luke x. 13, xi. 32, xiii. 3, 5, xv. 

7, 10, xvi. 30, xvii. 3, 4; Acts ii. 38, iii. 19, viii. 22, 
xvii. 30, xxvi. 20; 2 Cor. xii. 21 ; Rev. ii. 5 (twice), 
16, 21 (twice), 22, iii. 3, 19, ix. 20, 21, xvi, 9, 11. 

HKETavota : Matt. iii. 8, 11; Mark i. 4 ; Luke iii. 3, 

8, V. 32, XV. 7, xxiv. 47; Acts v. 31, xi. 18, xiii. 24, 
xix. 4, XX. 21, xxvi. 20; Rom. ii. 4; 2 Cor. vii. 9, 
10; 2 Tim. ii. 25 ; Heb. vi. i, 6, xii. 17; 2 Pet. iii. 9. 



82 



'VII. 

METANOIA THE WORD OF CHRIST TO THE 
PRESENT AGE. 

In all that we have now said we have 
shown ourselves anxious that, in the trans- 
lated New Testament, the Summons in the 
original proclamation of the Gospel should be 
made to appear as profound and significant 
as it really was, and thus be made to unite 
itself with the intellectual and spiritual Hfe of 
the present century as keenly as it did with 
the first. We would have it a fresh, liv- 
ing, all-comprehensive, all-powerful Sum- 
mons now. 

We desire this, first, in order that the 
unity of the New Testament may be seen to 
lie in it from the beginning as in a germ, and 
to branch and flower from it in every part, 
as from a stem. 

We desire this, next, for the more impor- 
83 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

tant and vital reason that the ethical and 
practical character of the rehgion of Christ 
may be revealed in its real supremacy over 
the emotional theory which has so long dis- 
proportionately prevailed. 

But, above all, we desire it — above all, 
from its including these and comprehending 
more — because it implies the use of the entire 
nature of man, intellectual, moral, aff ectional, 
spiritual, his human part and his divine part, 
in the act of apprehending and appropriat- 
ing the truth of God. The whole A^ous is 
appealed to, the whole Mind is engaged in 
seeing Him who is invisible, and in doing 
His will. 

For it is now the unhappy fact that the 
Christian religion is so specifically applied to 
one portion of this Mind and to one state of 
it that if the requisition were strictly insisted 
upon as a standard and test, many persons 
of the purest character and highest princi- 
ple would be denied the name of Christian, 
though palpably actuated by the faith and 
spirit of Christ. The penitential condition 
is not all, however much it may be. The rec- 
ognition of Christ may spring from a wider 
surface and even a deeper principle than 
84 



The Word of Christ to the Present Age, 

that one agonized nerve in the retina of the 
soul. 

" METANOEiTE ! " It is a generous word, 
looking outwardly from the life that now is 
to that which is to come. Let us have its 
equivalent in gospel and epistle wherever 
it appears. Let it speak to this age, at least, 
in full, not muffled, articulation — to this age 
with its wide speculation upon the mystery 
of being, with its agnostic revolt from the re- 
Hgion that is preached, with its critical study 
of the historic Christ, and yet latent disposi- 
tion to believe in Him. 

" Metanoeite ! " It is time that the Herald 
uttered it again as He uttered it once. It 
bears to us the all-necessary message of con- 
tradiction and the all-necessary announce- 
ment of a revolution. It brings with it the 
true and everlasting tidings — always news 
to blind and mortal men — that the apparent 
conditions of this hfe are the illusion of flesh 
and sense, and that the real conditions of hfe 
are the very reverse of what we are prone 
to think and believe. The Eternal and the 
Spiritual are all ; the temporal and the mate- 
rial are but the shadows of that substance. 
85 



The Great Meaning of Metdfiota. 

It were a bold word from any but a divine 
mouth, we should say, and yet the human 
tongue has been uttering it, virtually, all along 
in another sphere. What has been the procla- 
mation of Science in her own material world 
but " Metanoeite ! Change your Mind from 
the near testimony of Sense to the distant wit- 
ness of Discovery " : 

Sense says, " The sun rises in the east and 
revolves about the earth ; the earth is the cen- 
tre of the celestial sphere." But Science — 
Knowledge — proclaims a contradiction, and, 
with it, a revolution : " It is the earth that 
goes round the sun ; the sun is but one of 
that starry host; the blue firmament melts 
into illimitable space; it is an illuminated 
universe that lies out there, in which this ap- 
parently ponderous globe floats like an atom 
in a sunbeam." 

So Science, an echo of the divine voice, 
has enlarged, reversed, the whole conscious- 
ness of man. Her Metanoia has been pro- 
claimed not only here, but everywhere in her 
material field. Whithersoever she has gone, 
nature has inverted its apparent order, its 
phenomena have widened out into princi- 
ples that were once unknown, and the first 
86 



The Word of Christ to the Present Age. 

human impression of them has had to be 
revoked. 

It is an image, a parallel, of the Christian 
faith. The whole universe of the Spiritual is 
likewise being revealed to the knowledge of 
mankind. Time is declared to be of Eternal 
moment, and death the fullness of Life. We 
may discern the character of that other sphere 
by its inverse relation, point for point, to this. 

Given, then, we say, the intellectual realiza- 
tion of this to men, their moral consciousness 
will rise to it, their spiritual nature will en- 
large with it, their hearts and their Hves will 
deepen to the measure of it. They will re- 
volt more and more from sin and from the 
world. 

This is conversion indeed ; this is the Birth 
from Above. 

We can now imagine how, under such a 
conception, the pulpit would awake to the 
grandeur of its work, how the Church would 
awake to the grandeur of her cause. The 
themes of the one, the methods of the other, 
would move with splendor and with power to 
one definite and mighty end: the Summon- 
87 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia, 

ing of mankind to the Metanoia, this New 
Mind, and the announcement of everything 
on the divine side of Hfe which would in- 
spire and create it. 

For we are just on the verge of a great 
epoch. All this intellectual activity in the 
material world is surely working towards a 
moment of reaction when the same intensity 
of movement will turn the other way, and the 
universal demand will be for a knowledge 
of the Spiritual. The voice of material Sci- 
ence, crying in the wilderness, will be found 
to have been preparing the way for this. It 
will turn out to have been uttering a word 
which has roused the " expectation " of this 
age. Out of all this agnostic dust and ashes 
shall mount again the cry, *' Metanoeite! for 
the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." 

Let us see to it that neither the Bible, the 
Church, nor the pulpit gives, in that great re- 
vealing day, an uncertain sound. 

But our space is exhausted ; yet one word 
more to carry oiu* theme to its most practical 
and highest point. 

We have said all when we say that " Meta- 



88 



The Word of Christ to the Present Age. 

terms, one always implying the other. As 
large, therefore, as we understand the Reve- 
lation to be, we must understand the Meta- 
noia to be. They are reciprocal, as they 
develop, in character and degree. 

In their meeting and blending within us, 
then, we become partakers of the Divine 
Nature and are saved. What begins with 
being a '' Change of Mind toward God " 
deepens and broadens, as our nature turns 
all its disk that way, into that supreme reflec- 
tion of God in the soul, ''faith in our Lord 
Jesus Christ." 

Faith is the Metanoia touched to the quick. 
Faith is the Metanoia when it has reached 
the vital fibers of our being ; " the substance 
of things hoped for, the evidence of things 
not seen " ; " God, who commanded the 
light to shine out of darkness, shining into our 
hearts, to give the light of the Knowledge of 
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 

So it is the Metanoia which is bearing us 
heavenwards in Him. " We are Transformed 
into the same image from glory to glory." 
" We were sometime darkness, but now are 
we light in the Lord." " We press toward the 
mark for the prize of the Upward Calling of 
89 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

God in Christ Jesus." More and more is 
the earthly nature dissolving away and re- 
leasing the heavenly one ; deeper and deeper 
is the transfiguration working within ; and it 
will not cease even when we have passed the 
gates of death, and 

" Heaven opens on our eyes ; our ears 
With sounds seraphic ring!" 

What will be the inburst of another world 
upon the soul but the Change of Changes, 
the supreme Metanoia of the Eternal Life! 



90 



THE VIEW OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

We are glad to add the testimony of still another in- 
dependent scholar to the primary potency of the great 
Greek expression which opens the New Testament. 

This time the claim for it is entirely ethical ; the 
noetic element is not foremost, but follows an inward 
awakening of the moral consciousness, although that 
is first brought about by perception and thought. 
This striking conception of the word comes from 
Matthew Arnold, an equal master in Greek with De 
Quincey, gifted with the same philosophic and theo- 
logical insight, and a great Biblical student besides. 
In the case of De Quincey the view was a passing 
burst of inspiration over the word, and he makes no 
more of it. In the case of Arnold it comes in — 
though also quite episodically — as a part of a pro- 
found study into the genius of Christianity as it arose 
in Israel under the teaching of Christ. But he has 
an especial point to make — a protest against the sub- 
sequent metaphysical and dogmatic perversion of the 
original Semitic simplicity of Christian truth, the 
product of what he calls the "Aryan genius" — and 
it therefore does not fall in with his plan to make as 
much as he might have done either of the intellectual 
or the spiritual evolution of the principle so fully 
embodied, as we believe, in the expression. The 
91 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

working of both is strongly suggested, but, it seems 
to us, the vital and causative connection between what 
he calls the "method" of Jesus — i.e., Metanoia — 
and what he calls His "secret" — the utter renun- 
ciation of the lower self which culminated in " the 
word of the cross " — is not as vividly drawn out as 
it might have been. 

But the point of interest now is his passing allu- 
sion to our word. In putting it here in connection 
with that of De Quincey we show not only the mag- 
nificent sweep of its meaning, from the ethical to the 
intellectual and back, but how completely the idea of 
repentance is thrown out of all association with it by 
two great scholars and thinkers whose imaginations 
had not been discolored by any theological preposses- 
sion and tradition, and who, as born and bred Eng- 
lish churchmen, knew exactly what ^' repentance ^^ 
was understood theologically to mean. The follow- 
ing passages are from " Literature and Dogma" : 

" To have the thoughts in order as to certain mat- 
ters was conduct. This was the ' method ' of Jesus : 
setting up a great unceasing inward movement of at- 
tention and verification in matters which are three 
fourths of humajt life {righteousness), where to see 
true and to verify is not difficult. . . . Watch care- 
fully what passes within you, that you may obey the 
voice of conscience. . . . This, we say, is the ' method' 
of Jesus. To it belongs His use of that important 
word which in the Greek is Metanoia. We translate 
it ' repentance,^ a mourning and lamenting over our 
sins ; and we translate it wrong. Of * Metanoia,' as 
Jesus used the word, the lamenting one's sins was a 
92 



The View of Matthew Arnold. 

small part; the main part was something far more 
active and fruitful, the setting up an immense new 
inward movement for obtaining the rule of life. And 
* Metanoia,' accordingly, is a change of the inner man. 

" Mention and recommendation of this inwardness 
there often was, we know, in prophet or psalmist ; 
but to make mention of it was one thing, to erect it 
into a positive method was another. Christianity has 
made it so familiar that to give any freshness to one's 
words about it is now not easy ; but to its first re- 
cipients it was abundantly fresh and novel. It was 
the introduction, in morals and religion, of the famous 
Know thyself oi the Greeks ; and this among a people 
deeply serious, but also wedded to moral and religious 
routine, and singularly devoid of flexibility and play 
of mind. For them it was a revolution. . . . This 
is the true line of religion; it was the line of Jesus. 
To work the renovation needed He concentrated His 
efforts upon a method of inwardness, of taking covlX^- 
^€^ oi conscience.''^ (Page 174.) 

" Christ's new and different way of putting things 
was the secret of His succeeding where the prophets 
could not. . . . He put things in such a way that 
His hearers were led to take each rule or fact of con- 
duct by its inward side, its effect upon the heart and 
character; then the reason of the thing, the meaning 
of what had been mere matter of blind rule, flashed 
upon them. . . . The hardest rule of conduct came to 
appear to them infinitely reasonable and natural, and 
therefore infinitely prepossessing." (Page 94.) 

" While the Old Testament says, * Attend to con- 
duct,' the New Testament says, * Attend to the feel- 
93 



The Great Meaning of Metdnoia. 

ings and dispositions whence conduct proceeds ! ' And 
as attending to conduct had very much degenerated 
into deadness and formality, attending to the springs 
of conduct was a revelation, a revival of intuitive and 
fresh perceptions^ a touching of morals with emotion. 
. . . Man came under a new dispensation, and made 
with God a second covenant." (Page 96.) 

" At the Christian era . . . the time had comey^r 
inwardness and self-construction — a time to last till 
the self-construction is fully achieved," (Page loi.) 

It will be noticed that while De Quincey, taking 
the summons " Metanoeite " as a word to the whole 
world in all ages, gives rein to the whole intellectual 
consciousness, Arnold keeps it within its original 
bounds as addressed peculiarly to Israel, and ad- 
dressed not so much at first to the intellect of Israel 
as — through a wondrous tact in teaching — to the latent 
spiritual consciousness, the intellect then awakening 
to the rationale of the law. But this double witness 
of opposite minds from opposite directions to the same 
philological profundity in the word is very impressive. 



94 



THE ECLIPSE OF METANOIA BY 
PCENITENTIA. 



AN IMPOSSIBLE EXPEDIENT TO END IT : ' RE- 
PENTANCE " TO BE MADE TO MEAN 
METANOIA. 

The suggestion of the theme of this Addi- 
tional Essay came about in the following 
way : 

During a recent residence in London we 
saw a notice in an American Church paper 
of a kind reference to the essay on Metanoia, 
by Dr. Brooke Foss Westcott, which seemed 
to indicate an agreement with the view we 
had taken. As Dr. Westcott (now the Bishop 
of Durham, but at the time Canon of West- 
minster, and Regius Professor of Divinity, 
Cambridge) had been one of the most distin- 
guished and influential of the scholars en- 
95 



The Eclipse of Metdfioia by Pcsfiitentia. 

gaged upon the revision of the New Testa- 
ment, and had been especially prominent in 
furnishing the Greek text which formed the 
groundwork of the New Version, we had rea- 
son to suppose that the reference might be 
accompanied with some allusion to the action 
of the revisers on the rendering of Werdvoia, 
But even aside from that, we felt that any 
expression of assent, however qualified, in 
coming from such an authority, would carry 
with it a weight and a consequence that 
would command the highest respect. 

A note of inquiry ehcited this courteous 
reply : 

" 6 ScROPE Terrace, 
" Cambridge, November 19, 1887. 

" There was a reference to your essay in a 
paper on the Revised Version, in the * Expos- 
itor.' I have not a copy of the magazine at 
hand, but I think it was in the paper which 
appeared in August. 

" I intended to say that you had brought 
out with singular power and truth the mean- 
ing of Mfiravota, while I could not see that 
the translation could be modified. 

" The preacher and the scholar must trans- 
figure repenta7ice^ even B.'^Jides and gratia have 
96 



An Impossible Expedient to End It. 

been transfigured. In this work your essay 
will, I trust, be of eminent service." 

The above extract gives all of the reply 
that refers to the essay, and is introduced 
here because it adds materially to the force 
of one of the remarks in the passage from the 
" Expositor," which will be found below. 

This admirable statement, covering so 
briefly and yet so comprehensively the whole 
question, appears in one of a series of papers 
entitled " * Some Lessons of the Revised Ver- 
sion of the New Testament,' by Rev. Pro- 
fessor B. F. Westcott, D.D., D.C.L., Canon 
of Westminster" (August, 1887, p. 86). 

As the passage is in the form of a foot-note, 
and bears no connection with anything in the 
text, it was apparently written in the proof 
after our essay had been read. The matter 
could hardly have suggested itself otherwise, 
as there had been no change in the transla- 
tion of Merdvoia, and therefore no occasion 
for discussion of the subject. The statement 
has an especial interest, therefore, not only 
as having been drawn out by the essay, but 
97 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Fcenitentia. 

also as conveying the mind of the revisers on 
the question of the rendering '' repetitaiicer 
If it does not explain their silence in passing 
over it, it suggests their difficulty in dealing 
with it. The passage is as follows : 

" One most important group of words, ren- 
dered in the Authorized Version 'repent^ 
^ repentafice^ (lieravoelv, fxerdvoLa, luterane- 
AEoOaL), offered great difficulties in transla- 
tion. 

"The first two Greek words [nEravoeiv^ 
fiSTdvoia) describe characteristically, in the 
language of the New Testament, a general 
change of mind, which becomes in its fullest 
development an intellectual and moral regen- 
eration ; the latter {jieTaiieXEGOai) expresses a 
special relation to the past, a feeling of regret 
for a particular action, which may be deep- 
ened into remorse. 

" It was of paramount importance to keep 
one rendering for the former words, which 
are key-words of the gospel, and it was im- 
possible to displace ' 7rpenf,^ 'repentance,^ 
which, though originally inadequate, are 
capable of receiving the full meaning of the 
original. 



An Impossible Expedient to End It. 

" No one satisfactory term could be found 
for fisTafjie^eaOaL. In the passage where it oc- 
curs in the same context with fierdvota it has 
been adequately rendered by ' regret ' (2 Cor. 
vii. 8 ff.) ; and elsewhere the limited appli- 
cation of the feeling has been indicated by 
the reflexive rendering * repent one^s self — 
never 'repent^ absolutely (Matt. xxi. 29, 32, 
xxvii. 3 ; Heb. vii. 21); yet * without repen- 
tance'' {a\iETa\iiX7\ro<;) (Rom. xi. 29) is un- 
changed. 

*' Dr. T. Walden has expounded the apos- 
tolic force of \iE7dvoicL with great power and 
truth in an essay on ' The Great Meaning of 
the Word " Metanoia," Lost in the Old Ver- 
sion, Unrecovered in the New ' (New York, 
1882) ; but he has overlooked the fact that 
the idea of repentance^ like that of fierdvoia 
itself, can be transfigured by Christian use, 
and that the force of words is not limited 
by their etymology." 



99 



II. 

MerdvoLa transfigured greek. 

We are scarcely prepared to admit that 
we overlooked either of these points. 

As to the first — " That the idea of repen- 
tance, like that of MeraVom itself, can be trans- 
figured by Christian use." 

The ''idea of repe?tfance" it seems to us, 
is so deeply lined in the word " repentance " 
that the physiognomy of the term is fixed be- 
yond any power of essential alteration. Its 
intense look of sorrow may be and has been 
softened by Christian use into the expression 
of a pensive sense of unworthiness and guilt, 
and of a consequent mental determination 
which changes the character, the conduct, 
and the Hfe ; but the " fashion of its counte- 
nance " cannot be "altered " further than this, 
nor can its " raiment become white and daz- 



Metdnoia Transfigured Greek. 

zling," even as Merdvoia was " transfigured " 
when it stood on the " high mountain apart " 
of the New Testament, and its "face did 
shine as the sun," and its " garments became 
white as the Hght." 

The analogy suggested by the event which 
is so sacredly connected with the thought of 
" transfiguration " is here so true to the fact 
that we cannot but employ the force of the 
allusion. 

Now every Christian idea was " described 
so characteristically in the language of the 
New Testament" that any word taken from 
common use to represent it was heightened 
even to heaven in its meaning. 

And it was especially in the nature of a 
Greek word to bear such a transcendental- 
ization. Indeed, we may be sure that the 
Greek was made the vehicle of the Gospel 
not only because it was historically so oppor- 
tune, but because it was philologically so 
available; and no other of the three repre- 
sentative tongues that were heard around the 
cross could have uttered the message of the 
cross so well. 

The Jew arraigned the Christ and the 



The Eclipse of Metdtioia by Pmiitentia. 

Roman erected the cross; both were char- 
acteristically foremost on that ground; but 
to neither of them was intrusted " the word 
of the cross," which was to go into all lands 
and down to all ages. 

The Jew was as dumb as Zacharias was 
when he tried to give the benediction. He 
had lost his prophetic faith, as he had lost his 
Old Testament tongue. 

The Roman could only show " all the king- 
doms of the world, and the glory of them." 
His language was their law, the regulating 
outcome of the same genius that had con- 
quered them. It reflected the practical, 
material precision of his mind, but it was not, 
it never could be, except by infusion from 
without, elastic to the highest expression of 
spiritual ideas. It was not, it never could 
be, even under inspiration from above, equal 
to the adequate divine utterance of the truth 
whose " Kingdom was not of this world." 

Most remarkable, most significant was it, 
then, that the commission to reveal that truth 
was laid upon the idealizing tongue of the 
Greek; while the commission to order the 
Kingdom, to give direction to its mechanism, 
and to give names to its appointments, was 



Metdnoia Transfigured Greek. 

assumed by the methodizing tongue of the 
Roman. 



Take now the words before us, yisravoia 
and Repentance^ which Bishop Westcott asso- 
ciates under what we may understand as the 
metaphor of transfiguration. They are thor- 
oughly representative. The one is the in- 
augurating word of the Greek New Testa- 
ment, the other is the inaugurating word of 
its Latin translation; and in its Latin form 
(Pcenitentia) it is, according to the Latin 
mind, a precise equivalent of the Greek. 

'M.erdvoia is a word of classic origin and 
usage, but of extraordinary scriptural devel- 
opment. A process of transfiguration, after 
the sacred analogy we are thinking of, did 
actually take place in it. The change in our 
Lord, as described by the evangelists, was an 
outburst of inward radiance. Light did not 
fall upon Him. If came from within Hint. 
It was His own — the latent effulgence in His 
human nature of His divine nature, prophetic 
of the glory that was about to be revealed in 
Him. 

In like manner the first word used of Him, 
the first word used by Him, according to 
103 



The Eclipse of Afetd?ioia by P(£7iitentia. 

these evangelists, the word which opened 
His Kingdom when it was at hand, Merai^om, 
rose, through a Hke inward capacity for ut- 
terance, into a word of light-giving power. 
It was " transfigured " indeed. It turned out 
to be an anticipation, in a single compressed 
expression, of the whole rationale of Chris- 
tianity as that new faith was afterwards un- 
folded in the New Testament. It held the 
whole idea and method of the coming reve- 
lation in germ. It contained the principle 
which made the religion of Christ absolutely 
original — the principle of the radical renewal 
of the nature of man under the working of a 
Knowledge revealed to him from above, under 
the operation of a Spirit which came to him 
from above ; through which Knowledge and 
through which Spirit his nature was set free 
to do spontaneously, and not by legal regula- 
tion, all that it ought to do : *' his flesh being 
subdued to the spirit," "sin could have no 
dominion over him: for he was not under 
law, but under grace." "There was there- 
fore now no condemnation to them that were 
in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of 
Life in Christ Jesus made men free from the 
law of sin and death." 
104 



Metdnoia Transfigured Greek. 

Hence Merdvoia was the "key -word of the 
Gospel," as Bishop Westcott finely says. It 
opened to and potentially entered into every- 
thing. No door called by any other name, 
such as " faith," no chamber known by any 
other name, such as " renewal," was beyond 
the application of this master key. 

Turn now to the expression which has 
undertaken to supply its place both in the 
proclamation and in the operation of the 
Kingdom of God. 

'' Repentafice " is a word of classical Latin 
origin and of Latin theological and ecclesi- 
astical descent. The core of it is not mind, 
but pam. The note of it is not of emancipa- 
tion, but of condemnation. The scope of it 
is not spiritual, but juridical. The working 
of it is not joyful, but sorrowful. Its face 
is turned in horror towards sin, not in rap- 
ture towards righteousness. It is a way to 
righteousness, but by the way of retreat. It 
flees the evil in fear of "penalty " — of the puni- 
tive action of God or of its own conscience. 
In its effective operation it can take hold of 
the Mind, change the mental attitude, deter- 
mine the mental purpose, but it can never 
105 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Panitentia. 

alone renew the whole spiritual constitution 
of the Mind. It may be the beginning of 
amendment of life, but is not potential to 
the consummation of life. It is retrospec- 
tive, and it leads to introspection, often to in- 
tense spiritual self-consciousness, often to the 
most humble gratitude to God for salvation 
through Christ. In the awakening of Msra- 
voia it is always at hand, a powerful phase 
of it, an inevitable incident of it, a helpful, if 
not encouraging, attendant upon it. 

The Latin instinct amounted to insight 
when it made so much oi pcenitentia as an 
element of Merai^om, but the instinct over- 
shot the insight when in aiming at the one it 
lost sight of the other. All Christians have 
adopted the excellent word, because, so far 
as it goes, it is a true word ; and the above, 
we believe, is an accurate account of its theo- 
logical acceptation among us. 

But can it be '' transfigured," even till it is 
as radiant as the word which illumined the 
face of Christ in the beginning, and illumined 
all His teaching and the teaching of His apos- 
tles to the end? Has it any interior capacity 
to develop such a new transformation? On 
the contrary, will it not prove utterly intrac- 
106 



Metdnoia Transfigured Greek. 

table under such a strain against its grain? 
We can imagine it disguised, but never trans- 
figured. We can imagine it glowing as with 
phosphorus, but never with genuine light. 
We can imagine it raised to such a power 
by a sort of conjuration, but what a mere 
apparition it would be ! Who of us can con- 
ceive of a word so intrinsically dark ever pass- 
ing itself off as conveying a conception so 
bright and so noble as this: — "a general 
Change of Mind, which becomes in its fullest 
development an intellecttcal and moral Regen- 
eration "? 



107 



III. 



REPENTANCE PERSISTENT LATIN. 

Let us now turn to the other point which 
we are also hardly ready to admit that we 
overlooked — " that the force of words is not 
hmited by their etymology." 

This is said, of course, in the interest of 
the idea that '' repentance ^^ can be made to 
express the meaning of Merdvoia by ignoring 
the origin and usage of the Latin-Enghsh 
word. 

If now, we follow out the line of this sug- 
gestion, we shall be led into a more positive 
exposure of its claims. 

Our language is full of words which once 
possessed a signification that is now extinct, 
and which have since taken up an unlimited 
range of appHcation because of their inde- 
pendence of all etymology. Our dictionaries 
are overrun with such hermit-crabs, occupy- 
io8 



^^ Repentance " Persistent Latin. 

ing and dragging about the shells of words 
whose primary meanings have long ago out- 
grown or abandoned them. 'B\xt poenitefttia 
has never been one of this sort. It has never 
exhibited any such facility in, or even any 
tendency to, shedding its shell. On the con- 
trary, its whole history shows that it has been 
endowed with an extraordinary determina- 
tion to hold on to its original meaning, and 
as extraordinary a capacity to accommodate 
itself to all circumstances, without forgetting 
the idea out of which it was made and the end 
unto which it was appointed. If there ever 
was a word which has been as phenomenal 
for persistency in preserving its type, in both 
outer form and inner life, as other words 
have been phenomenal for the curious re- 
sults of a willing variation from what they 
once were, it is this very word, which we 
know so well in its English expression as 
" repentance." 

It resembles, as we recall its long career, 
that famous species of the nautilus which, 
from the outset, seems to be endowed with 
an instinct of predestination. The creature 
simply enlarges itself under the necessity of 
development that is upon it, without abandon- 
109 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Pmnitentia. 

ing anything that ever essentially belonged to 
it. As it outgrows its quarters it builds on one 
chamber after another to accommodate the 
expanding eras of its life. As it increases ex- 
ternally it is always the same, coiling closely 
about its original axis. As it develops in- 
ternally it is again always the same, clinging 
as closely to the seat of its original vitality, 
even keeping open communication, through 
the whole series of its dividing partitions, 
by a living siphuncular cord, with the cell in 
which it began. 

Foenitentia, in like manner, has ever ex- 
hibited a similar potency in enlarging the 
scope of its own application in just such a 
succession of chambers, and in developing 
just such an unchangeable purpose to mean 
exactly, and no more, what it was primarily in- 
tended to mean. You may look into its black 
mouth, and there is the self-same primitive 
cephalopod, still sufficient unto itself because 
occupying the sufficient mouthpiece of an 
idea which comes home to all ages and to 
all conditions of mankind. 

It comes so universally home because its 
origin was so primitively homely. Its whole 
meaning arose in and was represented by 
no 



^^ Repentance " Persistent Latin. 

the Sanskrit monosyllable Pu, — to cleanse 
frojn dirt. Fcenitentia has always retained 
and has always sustained this primary idea 
oi purgation. Its career has been marked by 
progressive historic stages, in every one of 
which this idea has in some way prevailed. 

When it developed itself among the pri- 
meval Greeks, it was noLvrj, sl word for blood- 
money. A murderer, say, by a redeeming 
ipa.yment, purged himself of all further respon- 
sibility to the relatives of the man he had 
slain. Their vengeance was satisfied; they 
no longer pursued him. Hence the word 
came to signify " vengeance." 

When the idea developed itself among the 
Latins it was pasnay and it rose with Roman 
civilization into an expression closely identi- 
fied with the criminal law. It became a desig- 
nation for all grades of punishment inflicted 
under the law, whereby those who had of- 
fended or injured the community made their 
peace with it, satisfied justice — in a word, 
purged themselves — by bearing the penalty 
which had been fixed upon as measuring the 
degree of their transgression. To use another 
word from the same root, they expiated their 
crime against the state. To use still another, 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Poenitentia. 

they were purified in the eye of the law by 
what they had suffered. 

The term poe^ia thus belonged to the court 
of law and to the language of the judgment- 
seat. Whence our modern dupHcation of it 
in the legal phrase " pain and penalty." 

But the expression panifenfia, which was 
formed out of it, and which represented the 
pain of one who thus bore \ht pe?ialty of his 
misdeeds, was never a legal term. The law 
in that day did not concern itself with what 
the condemned criminal felt. But the popu- 
lar mind did, and put itself in sentimental 
sympathy with him. Hence came the coin- 
ing of p(BftiteJitia, as a current word in Latin 
Hterature for the sorrow or regret which fol- 
lowed when one had made a mistake or 
committed an error of any kind. It meant 
exactly the after-care which was conveyed by 
MeraiieXeia (Metameleia) in the Greek. It 
was too variously used to retain any strong 
reminiscence of its origin. Indeed, its range 
of application came to be very much that of 
" repenfa/ice " in our common speech. It re- 
lated to affairs or to morals, as the case might 
be, and indicated a f eehng which mightbe fleet- 



^* Repentance " Persistent Latin, 

ing and shallow or profound and effectual, ac- 
cording to the levity or gravity of the occasion. 

When, however, pcenitentia was taken up 
by Latin Christianity it deepened into an ex- 
pression of very serious import. It rapidly 
revived all the ideas and associations that 
lay in pcena itself. It put itself first on high 
moral ground exclusively. It put itself next 
on divine juridical ground exclusively. It 
seems to have met Meravo^a near the close 
of the second century, when Christian ideas 
were beginning to find utterance in the Latin 
tongue. Up to that moment the universal 
church, even in Rome itself, spoke but one 
language — the language of the New Testa- 
ment. But now the " Old Latin " version 
arose in North Africa, and the Latin lawyer 
Tertullian began to write. 

The springs which hitherto had burst froni 
the hills v/ere now made to send their living 
waters through a Roman aqueduct. Practi- 
cal and available precision of idea set in. 
The Latin version began to mould the theol- 
ogy of the age. 

It is quite evident that Meravom was al- 
ready in a condition to meet the new move- 
113 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Poenitentia. 

ment half-way. It had degenerated from its 
New Testament use. It had subsided from 
its apostoHc height. We have neither time 
nor space for reasons and conjectures why, 
as they suggest themselves in contemplating 
a period of which we know very little, except 
that there was a general declension after the 
ApostoHc Age. But it would seem as if Me- 
rdvoia had already lost its etymology, and 
now drew its signification from the idea of 
fierd and avoia, a return from madness or 
folly. We know at least this much: that 
Lactantius, a century later, so understood 
and interpreted it, giving his impression of its 
import in the rendering resipisce?itia^ a word 
which Beza afterwards worked for what it was 
worth, in his avoidance of the Romish poe7ii- 
ientia of the Vulgate. But at the time we 
are speaking of, Merdvoia, now possibly no 
higher than Metam^leia, appears to have 
assimilated itself very kindly with p(je?iitentia, 
which, accordingly, with Roman promptitude 
and energy, at once undertook to dominate 
and direct the thought of the Church. 

After this a sad fate awaited Merdvoia 
itself. Having thus sunk its apostolic iden- 
114 



*^ Repentance ^^ Persistent Latin, 

tity, its degeneration went on in the usage of 
Greek ecclesiastical speech, till finally it sank 
so low as to stand only for a vamox penitential 
genuflection; so many "metanoias" — say, 
bowings of the head — for such and such a 
peccadillo ! 

Strangely and curiously enough, too, the 
original New Testament idea of it was only 
finally saved by the symbol with which it 
had been scripturally coupled, fidnriafia 
Msravotag.^ " Baptism," a word adopted let- 
ter for letter by the Latin from the Greek, 
but coupled in the Latin version with pceni- 

1 It is very clear to us that the " Baptisma" of 
John, as twinned with his " Metanoia," was a sym- 
bol of revivification — an intimation of it as it was 
afterwards apostolically understood. The idea of 
water as a symbol of cleansing was obvious, com- 
monplace, and universal. But this rite was, in the 
whole tremendous manner of it, an invocation of the 
power of water in a way that was as profound, pecu- 
liar, and original as Christianity itself. It pointed 
expressly to the work of the Spirit, which was not 
to purify but to re-create. And it pointed as expres- 
sively to the work of water as the renewer and re- 
storer of life. We can only hint at this its sugges- 
tive coincidence with the meaning of Metanoia. The 
view can be impressively substantiated, but not now, 
and here. 

"5 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Poenitentia. 

tentia, in the sense of "purification," had in 
itself strength enough to keep alive in theo- 
logical thought its primitive and only true 
association with " regeneration." 



ii6 



IV. 

THE ROMAN UTILIZATION OF "REPENTANCE." 

But to come back to our main point. 
Let us follow very briefly, yet, we hope, 
sufficiently, the adventures of our nautilus 
poenitentia. 

Tertullian tells us in the opening of his 
" De Poenitentia " that all former general lit- 
erary notions of it must be dismissed ; that as 
a Christian word it meant " a passion of the 
mind, or grief for the offense of our former 
acts." This exclusive exaltation of it arose 
from the consciousness of sin in the sight of 
God, and from its consequent emotion, which 
was more a terror of His judgments than a 
delight in His glad tidings. Under the fear 
of Him and the flight from evil the life was 
changed. The sinner, awakening to the mad- 
ness of his course, took shelter in the Chris- 
tian community as in a city of refuge, and 
there, in that centre of light, his soul became 
117 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Pcenitentia, 

irradiated with the joy of faith, the conscious- 
ness also of having been redeemed, and hence 
of absolute security in the household which 
gathered around the table of the Lord. 

But in the practical working of that com- 
munity of grateful love in the saving presence 
of Christ, the sinful propensities of human 
nature proved too irrepressible ; the theoreti- 
cal horror, also, of evil in that age of specu- 
lation over it, in addition to this practical 
experience with it, proved too intense ; and 
the juridical tradition of the Old Testament, 
besides, was felt to be too authoritative (the 
New Testament had scarcely been put to- 
gether yet), for the idea of poenitentia to re- 
main in its single and simple form. The 
Roman genius for law and practical organ- 
ization, therefore, soon laid hold of it, and 
began to develop all its resources from that 
time on. 

The word began by meeting admirably, be- 
cause after a legal manner, a difficulty which 
had developed itself in the Christian com- 
munity from the very beginning. We find 
it spoken of as so applied in the latter part 
of TertulHan's treatise. He speaks of those 
ii8 



The Roman Utilization of ^' Repentance. ^^ 

who had turned out derelict to the faith and 
dehnquent to its righteousness, and who had 
therefore brought reproach upon the com- 
munity. The Church had to vindicate its 
own purity before the world, and yet, unlike 
the State under similar circumstances, it had 
to sympathize in mercy with the sinner. So 
poenitentia now came before it not only, as at 
first, with the signification of tears unto turn- 
ing, but of tears unto returning ; not only "pri- 
mary repenta7ice^'' but '' secondary repentance ^^ 
as Tertullian terms it. Under the strange 
and pathetic phenomenon of the excommu- 
nicated — the penitents, as they came to be 
called — praying for restoration, a condition 
of things daily increasing in intensity and be- 
coming a fixed feature in the Church, the word 
soon concentrated most of its force upon the 
latter meaning. It developed a growing legal 
aspect as it elaborated itself in dealing both 
justly and mercifully with the crowd oi peni- 
tents which thronged about the church doors 
and even groveled at the feet of the presbyters, 
pleading for readmission. There they were, 
making their appeal in every possible way, 
trying to purge themselves by voluntary aus- 
terities, to expiate their offense by self-punish- 
119 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Fcunitentia. 

ments, and to make satisfaction to the authori- 
ties by such outward demonstrations of sorrow 
as would prove their sincerity. And all the 
Church could do was to cry, as it now sup- 
posed John the Baptist to have cried, " Foeni- 
tentiam agite! " " Do penance I " and to set 
about reducing the business of restoration to 
a system, the contrivance of various tests and 
conditions under which it could, with safety 
to itself and a good conscience towards God, 
" remit " the sin and readmit the sinner. 

Then began a question and controversy, 
which lasted for many generations, over the 
extent of the Church's authority to legislate 
against sin, and to occupy the judgment-seat, 
and to administer the prerogative of God in 
" pardoning " or " absolving." 

It was a blind work that it had undertaken, 
for it could not see into the heart ; it could 
only judge by the outside ; and it could only 
exact coarse external evidences of reforma- 
tion. The whole realm of the inward mind 
and of the inner motives was out of its prov- 
ince ; and therefore just so much of the King- 
dom of God as was " within " and that came 
not " with observation " was beyond its juris- 
diction. 

120 



The Roman Utilization of ^' Repentance. ^^ 

Nevertheless the Roman genius rose to the 
occasion, and did not hesitate to construct 
the scales of divine justice with greater and 
greater ingenuity of elaboration, and with 
fitter and fitter adaptation to its own ready- 
handling. 

It were needless to follow our nautilus 
posnitentia as it went on from epoch to 
epoch, camerating itself around one crisis 
after another, and evolving a whole system 
of expiatory penalties, until it culminated fi- 
nally in the " Sacrament of Penance," a grand 
purgative transaction under hierarchical ad- 
ministration, with a jurisdiction extending, on 
the one hand, into Purgatory for the dead, 
and, on the other, into the equally question- 
able realm of Casuistry for the living. 

However, it looked at last as if the Latin 
creature had expended all its vitaHty and 
was about to turn into death and corruption, 
when it reached the climax of its assumption 
in the sale of indulgences, and the conse- 
quent reaction of the Reformation burst 
upon Christendom. One would suppose that 
the word would have perished in Protestant- 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Fcenitentia. 

ism after it had led the Church up to such a 
scandalous catastrophe as the loss of its hier- 
archical hold on the conscience and the future 
destiny of mankind. But no. The Refor- 
mation turned out to be only the reconstruc- 
tion of another chamber. The inexhaustible 
energy and persistency of a word which had 
so powerful an etymology, and a usage in 
idea which had all along been nourished 
by the Vulgate, now came forth in a new 
manifestation. Instead of drawing back into 
its shell and dying there, pa7iite7itia magni- 
fied itself the more. It began to secrete for 
itself a more roomy and refined compartment. 
Under the influence of the Vulgate it rose 
anew in almost every European version of 
the New Testament; and in no version, 
though direct from the Greek, did Merai^om 
in its high apostolic meaning find room 
enough to breathe. The Latin substitute re- 
mained in all its primeval force, still keeping 
up its suction from its Aryan origin in the 
idea of purgation, only dropping its coarse 
medieval accretions ; and so around it gath- 
ered again the fabric of the modern popular 
theology, still Latin to the core. 



122 



V. 

THE GOSPEL IN THE SHADOW OF THE LAW. 

In the facile English tongue the Latin 
cephalopod pcenitentia put forth three ten- 
tacles under which English Christianity en- 
tered upon its practical conception of the 
Gospel. All three may now be found in the 
English Prayer-book — happily only two of 
them in the American: '^ penance ^^ in the 
sense of discipline ; ^' penitence ^^ in the sense 
of contrition ; and " repentance " or " re-peni- 
tence^^ in the sense of such an effectual work- 
ing of either or of both as resulted in amend- 
ment of life. 

As " repentance^"' therefore, it took the fore- 
most place, and as " repentance^^ though often 
badly confounded with the other two, it was 
now expounded as identical in meaning with 
"^Erdvoia^ dragging back the Greek idea into 
its own Hmitations, and so attenuating the 
123 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Poetiiientia. 

substance of the Greek word as finally to put 
its ideal quality out of sight altogether. Me- 
rdvoia was again Latinized out of its very 
soul, and its essence shrank away into a cir- 
cumstance. 

A scholar and theologian like Jeremy Tay- 
lor (who wrote his great treatise on *^Repen- 
tance " about forty years after 1 6 1 1 , in order 
to correct the false impressions which were in- 
evitable to the word), might do his best to fix 
and distinguish the lost meaning, and to as- 
semble under the term " repentance " the ideas 
of " faith " and " renewal " and " reconcilia- 
tion," but the word was not to be so easily 
rarified out of its concrete force. With all 
his ingenuity it baffled and contradicted him. 
He could not make it " serve his turn," as he 
said it would. 

And so it will always stand for what it origi- 
nally was, and so it will always reverse the 
theory and the action of the Gospel. Its mis- 
leading tendency can never be expounded out 
of it. It will always give the Gospel a legal 
aspect ; it will always, therefore, dim the near 
Fatherhood of God in setting Him upon a 
distant judgment-seat; it will always put 
124 



The Gospel in the Shadow of the Law. 

Christ in a wrong relation to both God and 
man ; it will always proclaim that man must 
be purged from sin by his own self-condem- 
nation and by his formal discharge from a 
Divine Tribunal, and not set free {d<peaig), 
first and essentially, through that renewal of 
his nature (Meravom) under the knowledge 
of God in Christ and the inspiration of the 
Spirit, by which only the strength of sin is 
undermined and the creative work of God 
in the soul resumed. 

It is useless, also, to deny or ignore the 
fact of this perversion and reversal of the 
ideally sublime and gracious message of the 
good tidings of great joy, in the presence of 
the forbidding systems of theology, partly in- 
herited from Latin sources, partly constructed 
by modern ingenuity, which have been nur- 
tured and sustained, as well as, to a degree, 
originally inspired, by this Latin conception of 
poenitentia. With the undying legalism which 
is imbedded in it ; with its undying reminis- 
cence of vengeance, of punishment, of expi- 
ation ; with its undying suggestion that the 
Change of Mind is only a change of will 
wrought by fear; with its undying determi- 
nation towards a theory of radical corruption 

125 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Poenitentia. 

in which tears are an all-powerful cleansing 
agent ; with its too ready readaptation, there- 
fore, of the method in which human nature 
was dealt with in the Old Testament — as 
itself a creature of the law, whether Mosaic 
or Roman — it has erected a judgment-seat 
in the heavens and earth, and put upon 
the face of God the frown of outraged jus- 
tice, and lowered the great and graphic met- 
aphor which pervades the New Testament 
— simply for convenience and vividness of 
expression in an age and to a people pene- 
trated with legal ideas — into an actual divine 
reality ; pressing the pervading parable liter- 
ally, as corresponding point for point to the 
forensic and judicial arrangements which 
have come up in communities of men when 
deahng with evil. 

Even thus, as we conceive, has this court- 
room conception of Christianity been made 
its working theory, ever since the penitential 
idea was given this initial and commanding 
position in the New Testament and in the 
Church. 

" Repentance ^^ when all its etymological 
potency is challenged and drawn out by its 
126 



The Gospel in the Shadow of the Law. 

use as a theological word, or rather as a dog- 
matic key-word — as it is when it is put in 
the place of ^lErdvoia — dominates the whole 
conception of the Gospel. It not only, as 
we say, reverses the order of its thought, 
and gives a wrong deflection to its ideas, 
but it infects everything within its reach. 

It throws a shadow here and a color there 
even over the translation of the Greek Tes- 
tament, and sustains the Latin tinge which 
pervades the texture of its English every- 
where. It has thus obscured the absolute 
originahty of the New Testament as com- 
pared with the Old. And it has thus facili- 
tated the perpetuation of Judaism in the 
Church — that is, the dominance of external- 
ism in taste and sentiment ; of mechanism in 
methods of faith and devotion ; of artificial- 
ism in thought and feeling ; of literalism and 
conventionalism — all that is fatal to mental 
breadth and spiritual depth, all that shuts the 
universal humanity of Christ out of the uni- 
versal heart. 

And yet " repentance " is a word of indis- 
pensable value to us if it can be kept where 
it originally belonged in Latin literature, and 

127 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Pcenitentia, 

where it really belongs now in common Eng- 
lish speech ; if it can be kept in the meaning 
it had in popular usage before its etymology- 
was roused into activity by its adoption as a 
dogmatic principle, and before the call '^Re- 
pent ye! " was understood to be the creative 
fiat of the new heavens and the new earth. 
We have to be grateful to the practical Latin 
genius for an expression which seizes upon 
all that poignancy of feeling with which the 
enlightened conscience turns against sin, and 
which describes with a dignity and depth given 
to no other word that sense of unworthiness 
and guiltiness which grows more and more 
acute as the standard of righteousness rises 
before every heart. In that, its true sphere, 
it is indeed a divine sequel to M^Erdvoia^ the 
shadow which witnesses to the power of that 
refulgent word. When we " turn from the 
darkness to the light " — which is the mean- 
ing of lAtrdvoia — it is a remnant of the dark- 
ness, our individual, personal share of it, 
dogging our footsteps and keeping us humble 
amid all the glory that shines about us in the 
knowledge of Jesus Christ. May it always 
express the " Metameleia " which it properly 
translates, and which Bishop Westcott defines 
128 



The Gospel in the Shadow of the Law. 

so well to be " a special relation to the past ; 
a feeling of regret for a particular action, 
which may be deepened into remorse," and 
— we may take the Hberty of reminding him, 
with Scripture authority for it (see Matt. xxi. 
29, where the son who refused to go to work 
" afterward repented himself, and went ") — 
deepened also into such a revulsion of feel- 
ing as brings with it amendment of conduct. 

Most true is it, then, that, as Bishop West- 
cott says, " the force of words is not limited 
by their etymology ; " but the remark cannot 
be applied, as he intends it to be applied, to 
^' repentance ^^ as an expression so plastic as 
to be easily moulded into the great meaning 
of Meravom. The energy of its etymology 
is too monopolizing, too pervadingly positive, 
as all its history shows, when given a tempt- 
ing occasion. It has been even powerful, 
aggressive, and intrusive enough to put the 
light of Meravota under a bushel for ages, 
and no hopeful theory over the manipulation 
of words to suit our purpose ought to per- 
suade us to trust it again. 



129 



VI. 

"disastrous twilight" in the revised 

VERSION. 

We are so careful in making a strong point 
of this because the revisers themselves were 
evidently influenced by a contrary impression 
when they decided not only to let the trans- 
lation of Merdvota alone, but decided also to 
pass so quietly over it as not even to awaken 
a suspicion or a question as to its absolute 
equivalence. Indeed, Bishop Westcott would 
seem to be giving their view of the matter, 
and speaking on their behalf, when he says, 
" It was impossible to displace ' repent^ ' re- 
penia7ice^ which, though originally inade- 
quate^ are capable of receiving the full mean- 
ing of the origi7iair 

This, it will be noticed, is his idea of the 
" transfiguration " of " repentance " put in a 
different way. It is an expression of confi- 
dence in the readiness of that Latin word to 
130 



''Disastrous Twilight^' in the Revised Version. 

take the stamp of the Greek word so thor- 
oughly that its own original image would be 
obhterated, its own identity be lost. In de- 
fault of the power to get rid of it, // could 
be made to do. All that he had just defined 
Meravom to be — " an intellectual and moral 
regeneration " — all the " apostohc force " 
that we have claimed for Meravom, which 
he admits to be a true exposition, is to be 
put into it. Its etymology is to be ignored. 
Its history is to be ignored. Even its every- 
day usage is to be ignored. It is to be arbi- 
trarily understood to convey the " full mean- 
ing of the original " for which it has so long 
stood, and nevermore any meaning which it 
has all along had. It is only a Latin word 
with a Greek face. It spells '' repentance ^^ 
but it is to be pronounced " Metanoia." 

What a curious spectacle would be pre- 
sented if this could be done, and what a con- 
fession it would be of the impotence of our 
own tongue under the paralysis of a tradi- 
tion! A word which was once thought to 
be a translation^ but which has since turned 
out to be a perversion, going back into the 
original by a process of absorption, and hence- 
forth depending upon the original for its defi- 
131 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Poenitentia. 

nition! This would be putting the moon 
into the eye of the sun and expecting the 
sun to shine. Neither luminary would then 
give its appointed light. It would be an 
eclipse of the greater by the lesser : lAErdvoia 
turned into nought but a lurid ring, because 
of the ball of blackness at the centre of it. 

It was to avoid the possibility of just such 
a " disastrous twilight " that, as Bishop West- 
cott says, " it was of paramount importance " 
to keep the word " repentance " clear and 
absolute in the version, unmixed with any 
association with its own former idea. In 
the version it should represent Meravom, 
and Meravom alone. Then the reader of 
the Revised Version, having discovered that 
" repentance " was a translation upwards into 
the meaning of Meravofa, would not be dis- 
tracted from that conception of it, either by 
anything which " repent ^^ might mean in 
popular speech, or by what it might mean 
elsewhere in the New Testament itself. 

But out of this "paramount" necessity 
there arose a difficulty, as it turned out, 
which the revisers did not and could not suc- 
cessfully overcome. "Repent " had a double 
132 



^'Disastrous Twilighf^ in the Revised Version. 

in the New Testament that would not down. 
There before them was MerafiiXeaOai (" Meta- 
m61esthai "), formidable and unremovable be- 
cause of its rightful claim to both the physi- 
ognomy and the soul of the word " recent," 
as men generally use it on serious occasions. 
And Bishop Westcott is obliged to admit 
that in only one instance was it made to 
give way and go out of sight. Everywhere 
else it stood its ground, or rather its ground 
had to be yielded, because no other of its 
English kindred had weight and dignity 
enough to fill its place. 

So the two luminaries of the Greek orig- 
inal — the one idea which rules the night of 
regret over things of the past, and figures so 
powerfully in the darkness of the Old Testa- 
ment as the reflection of a sun as yet unrisen ; 
and the other idea which rules the day of 
faith and righteousness, the sun that has since 
risen in the New — are represented in the Re- 
vised Version under conditions of most singu- 
lar aberration and confusion. The lesser orb 
not only shines alone in its proper sphere six 
times out of seven, but also invades the day, 
even to hiding the very disk of the daylight, 
even to robbing it of its distinction as well 
133 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Pcenitenfia. 

as its function, even to making, through the 
mixture of the two, a ghastly monotone of all 
its twoscore and thirteen variants of light. 

Such, then, is the result of the endeavor 
to cope with these two words in the original. 
^'Repentance " has been given a heightened or 
intensified signification wherever it stands 
for Meraz^om, and in its possession of this 
is to be its sole distinction. But when and 
where the distinction is to be made is left 
to the unlearned reader to find out for him- 
self. In one part of the New Testament 
*' repent ^^ means one thing, and in another 
part another thing; and so, between these 
two stools of '^ repentance ^^ he is still in as 
much danger as before the revision, of fall- 
ing into that low conception of the apos- 
tolic idea which generally prevails. 

Let us, now, however, draw from this mix- 
ture of the two words in the English Version 
a fair inference as to what " the repentance of 
the Gospel " is supposed to mean. 

First, it is a retrospective act of the mind. 

Second, it is a feeling specifically directed 
against sin. 

134 



''Disastrous Twilight'' in the Revised Version. 

Thirds it is this in such intense action that 
it brings about a change in the conduct and 
Hfe. 

Fourth^ it is this, also, in such effective 
action that it takes hold of the mind; so 
working upon the will as to change the men- 
tal habit and attitude, thus amounting to a 
conversion of the whole nature. 

Fifth, and this mental and spiritual atti- 
tude towards sin is the full import of the word 
Meravom. 

Now the obvious thought that occurs to one 
is this : the whole of the above conception of 
'' repetitance'' could have been easily put, by 
the New Testament writers, into the com- 
pass of MeraneXeia {" Metam^leia ") — which 
means " after-care." Why did they not do it? 
The expression would have lent itself most 
kindly to such a purpose. It could have been 
made to rise to any measure of that idea under 
their heightening hands. Besides that, Mera- 
fiiXeta and MerdvoLa were often very near in 
signification, as employed in popular speech 
among the Greeks. They ran in close par- 
allel on certain occasions — so much so that 
one would do as well as the other; though 
on other occasions they could diverge very 
135 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Fosnitentia. 

widely apart. Why was ^eraiiiXeia so care- 
fully avoided, and Meravom so conspicuously 
chosen? Because the idea of an after-care 
concentrated upon sin was not comprehen- 
sive enough. It did not take in the regener- 
ative motive and principle. It did not sug- 
gest the illuminated condition and action of 
the whole Mind — Mind in the sense of Nov^ 
— under which sin would lose its hold, would 
become less and less a dominating and de- 
flecting thing, and faith become more and 
more a foremost and active instinct ; under 
which the nerve would be more firm, the eye 
more fixed, in the aim at the mark, in the 
run for the goal. Hence, then came the 
selection and uniform employment of Mera- 
voia^ for the Mind turning from darkness be- 
cause of the cojning of light } 

1 There are two instances in the New Testament 
where the idea of Metam^leia, repentance, appears in 
express and designed contrast with the idea of Meta- 
noia, renewal of mind. 

The first is in Matthew xxi. 32, where the chief 
priests and the elders are charged not only with their 
failure to obey at first the proclamation of Renewal 
of Mind unto Faith in the coming Kingdom and the 
Christ, by the Baptist, who came to them " in the 
way of righteousness," but with " not even repenting 
136 



"Disastrous Twilight^' in the Revised Version. 

The real potency of the new life lay in 
prospection, not retrospection. It lay in 
faith, not in fear. It lay in knowledge, not 
in sorrow. It was an awakening to right- 
eousness, and therefore a sinning not. And 
hence, then, this is the primary word the evan- 
gehsts and apostles used, whether as initially 
proclamative or as potentially descriptive of 
the Christian life ; a word profound enough 
to comprehend, and far-reaching enough to 

themselves afterward " (oude iierefieTiTjdTjTe varepov) 
when they saw the publicans and harlots " believing " 
him and entering into the Kingdom of God before them. 

The other is in 2 Corinthians vii. 10, where the 
Corinthians, having been restored to their spiritual 
senses after a recent demoralization, under the awak- 
ening light thrown upon their gross stupefaction by 
St. Paul, were told by him that now they had come 
to a Metanoia — a very enthusiasm of righteousness 
— " a Metanoia not to be repented of'' {ajieTajie7i.T]rov). 

Here is the only place, by the way, where the re- 
visers felt compelled to change ** repenf^ into " re- 
gret." The phrase now runs, " a repentance which 
bringeth no regret,'''' instead of " a repentance not to 
be repented of." St. Paul is also made to " regret," 
not " repent,'''' his severe letter. 

How badly mixed were the ideas of the old trans- 
lators over these, in this striking instance, widely 
diverging words ! And this is all the revisers have 
done in clarifying their confusion. 
137 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Poenitentia. 

prophesy, the mightiest motive which could 
energize such a nature as that of man, namely, 
the personal power of the Son of God ; and 
the mightiest influence which could enter his 
inmost being to the upbuilding of his char- 
acter and Hfe, namely, the inspiration of the 
Spirit of God. 

But what the apostohc mind refused to 
do, even with the legalism of the Old Testa- 
ment before it, the translating mind, under 
the influence of that very precedent and of 
a prevaihng fashion of following it, has in- 
sisted upon doing. It has insisted upon im- 
posing the translation of the idea of Mera- 
IxeXeta upon the idea of Merdvoia ; and it has 
undertaken to do what the original writers 
did not undertake to do — to expand the idea 
of " repentance " {MeTaiieXsia) into the mean- 
ing of Merdvoia. What is more remarkable 
still, it has undertaken to adapt " repentance " 
to that high expression of Faith unto the 
Renewal of the spirit of the Mind, even after 
it has been so thoroughly sophisticated and 
artificiaHzed under its Romish use, and, we 
might add, after it has been since so habitu- 
ally Hmited by its Protestant interpretation. 
138 



VII. 

THE POWER OF LATIN PRESCRIPTION. 

Now how can we account for all this on 
the part of a body of men so learned, so judi- 
cious, so conscientious, and so courageous as 
the revisers undoubtedly were ? How can we 
account for their impression that " it was im- 
possible to displace * repent^ ' repentance^ ^^"^ 
How can we account for their allowing 
themselves to be in a position under which 
the proper disposal of Meravom and Mera- 
fjLsXsia, and of the idea of "repentance" as 
supposed to be shared by both, should have 
"offered great difficulties in translation"? 
How can we account, also, for the general 
sentiment of the Christian world which made 
it so quiet under such a mistranslation that 
the question was never raised before the 
revision nor during it — at least not raised 
enough to make it advisable to take the 
139 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Poenitentia. 

slightest apparent notice of this gross and 
dangerous rendering when they passed their 
microscope over it ? 

The only answer is a very human and 
therefore a very humiliating one. It was 
all owing to the paralyzing power of a long- 
established precedent — to the impalpable 
pressure of authority and example. It was 
all owing to the insidious influence of a Latin 
tradition, not only as felt in the general 
Latin texture of English speech, but as it 
had in this case become embalmed in a 
body of Latinized doctrine, most ancient and 
venerable ; in a theological spicery strong 
enough, when diffused in the Jerusalem 
chamber, to deaden even the sensibility of 
the alert intelligence which is now awakening 
to the dawn of a Greek age and a Johan- 
nine Christianity. Yes, strange as it may 
be to think such a thing, it was all owing 
to the long-armed Vulgate prescription, 
which had held every previous version of the 
New Testament in its grip, even from the 
days of the independent Tyndale, and the 
power of which was felt even by those who 
retouched his work at the close of the nine- 
teenth century, even as it was felt by those 
140 



The Power of Latin Prescription. 

who had retouched it in the opening of the 
seventeenth. 

What is more remarkable to observe is — 
by way of showing how persistent and special 
the descent of this tradition has been — that 
it appears nowhere else in the version than in 
this one consecrated hne. Whenever Noi)^ 
by itself, or in any of its other combinations, 
comes up in the translation, the revisers seem 
to breathe free, and render it with a full 
recognition of its noetic or intellectual ele- 
ment. It is almost an entertaining task to 
go over all these passages, and to see how 
fresh this atmosphere is all about them. We 
had written out the whole of them for inser- 
tion here, but this Supplementary Essay is 
already too long, and we can only give the 
references. Compare, in all cases, the Re- 
vised Version and the suggestive context. 

"^ovg, mind, understanding. The revisers, 
unlike the Authorized Version, have ren- 
dered it exclusively so, with the unfortunate 
exception of not drawing the line between it 
and (ppovTjiiio-, the dispositional idea of mental 
action. (Luke xxiv. 45 ; Rom. i. 28, vii. 23, 
141 



The Eclipse of Meidiioia by Pmnitentia. 

25, xi. 34, xii. 2, xiv. 5 ; i Cor. i. 10, ii. 16, 
xiv. 14, 15, 19; Eph. iv. 17, 23 ; Phil. iv. 7 ; 
Col. ii. 18; 2 Thess. ii. 2 ; i Tim. vi. 5; 2 
Tim. iii. 8 ; Tit. i. 15 ; Rev. xiii. 18, xvii. 9.) 

Neow, to see, to perceive, to understand. 
(Matt. XV. 17, xvi. 9, II, xxiv. 15 ; Mark vii. 
18, viii. 17, xiii. 14; John xii. 40; Rom. i. 
20 ; Eph. iii. 4, 20 ; i Tim. i. 17 ; 2 Tim. ii. 
7 ; Heb. xi. 3.) 

NoT/jua, a perception, a thought, a purpose, 
(2 Cor. ii. II, iii. 14, iv. 4, x. 5, xi. 3 ; Phil, 
iv. 7.) 

Aidvoia, a thinking through, the mind, the 
understanding. (Matt, xxii. 37 ; Mark xii. 30 ; 
Luke i. 51, X. 27 ; Eph. ii. 3, iv. 18; Col. i. 
21 ; Heb. viii. 10, x. 16; i Pet. i. 13 ; 2 Pet. 
iii. I ; I John v. 20.) 

Liav6r\\ia, thought, purpose. (Luke xi. 17.) 

"Avoia, want 0/ understanding. (Luke vi. 

11 ; 2 Tim. iii. 9.) 

"Evvoa, thought, intent, purpose. (Heb. iv. 

12 ; I Pet. iv. I.) 

'K.v6r\Toq, tmthinking, not understanding. 
(Luke xxiv. 25; Rom. i. 14; Gal. iii. i, 3; 
I Tim. vi. 9 ; Tit. iii. 3.) 

"kyvoia, ignorance. (Acts iii. 17, xvii. 30 ; 
Eph. iv. 18; I Pet. i. 14.) 
142 



The Power of Latin Prescription. 

'Ayvorjfia, ignorance (involuntary). (Heb. 
ix. 7, margin.) 

'ETTti'om, a thinking upon, thought. (Acts 
viii. 2 2.) 

'TnovoLa, a surmise, (i Tim. vi. 4.) 

ITpoi'oea), to foresee, to perceive before. 
(Rom. xii. 1712 Cor. viii. 21 ; i Tim. v. 8.) 

Yipbvoia, foresight, forethought. (Acts 
xxiv. 3; Rom. xiii. 14.) 

'Ayi^oeo), not to perceive, not to know. 
(Mark ix. 32; Luke ix. 45; Acts xiii. 27, 
xvii. 23 ; Rom. i. 13, ii. 4, vi. 3, vii. i, x. 3, 
xi. 25 ; I Cor. xi., xiv. 38 ; 2 Cor. i. 8, ii. 11, 
vi. 9 ; Gal. i. 22 ; i Tim. i. 13 ; Heb. v. 2 ; 
2 Pet. ii. 12.) 

'Tnovoeo), to conjecture, to surmise. (Acts 
xiii. 25, XXV. 18, xxvii. 27.) 

Karavoew, to see or perceive clearly, observe, 
consider. (Matt. vii. 3; Luke vi. 41, xii. 24, 
27, XX. 23 ; Acts vii. 31, 32, xi. 6, xxvii. 39 ; 
Rom.iv.19; Heb.iii. i,x.24; James i. 23,24.) 

Here are surely instances enough — if not 
all — limited to close variants of Noew and 
Novf, where their noetic or perceptive ele- 
ment, the very core of their meaning, is both 
recognized and rendered by the revisers, 
often with great spiritual significance. 
143 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Foenitentia. 

But Meravoeo) and Mera)oi«, words from 
the same mental stem, variants of the same 
intellectual idea, appear fifty-three times in 
the Greek Testament, only to disappear in 
the version! Not a sign, not a suggestion, 
of their real quaUty is conveyed to the Eng- 
lish reader! They have been kept and set 
apart to preserve and perpetuate the Latin 
tradition of " repent^^ " repentance^ 

The Greek pith has been pushed out of 
Meravom that it may pipe the Miserere \ 



144 



VIII. 

THE TRUE INTERPRETATION. 

It would have gone far to soften this situa- 
tion if the revisers had asked their eminent 
colleague, who had already done so much in 
furnishing them with the purest Greek text, 
to furnish them also with a marginal note 
which should throw a distinguishing side- 
light into their metanoian '' repent" and 
'' repentafice," If they had, it would prob- 
ably have been this : "^ ge?ieral Change of 
Mind, which becomes in its fullest development 
an intellectual and ffioral Regeneration . ' ' And 
if they had, these old Latin words, so pal- 
pably inadequate and incongruous, would 
have been on the way to be "displaced," 
both unceremoniously and soon. 

But as the margin has been left without this 
illustration, the only alternative now would 
seem to be the very unsatisfactory one which 
145 



- The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Pxiiitentia, 

is intimated in Bishop Westcott's personal 
note to us : ' 

" The preacher and the scholar must trans- 
figure * repentafice^ even as fides and gratia 
have been transfigured. In this work your 
essay will, I trust, be of eminent service." 

Which can only mean that, the revisers 
having failed to do it, or to do anything 
about it, the task of making the best of an 
inadequate and misleading translation is 
now thrown upon the pulpit and the com- 
mentators. 

This is not a pleasant fact to face: that 
the original Scriptures should, in any essen- 
tial part or in any vital word, be so incom- 
municable to the people, that the people must 
be dependent upon their teachers not only for 
exposition, but for revelation itself. Such, 
we take it, is not the true idea of a version, 
and one may well be impatient if the cause 
for it should not reside in the original, but 
in some conventionalism of habit or taste or 
theory or principle on the part of the trans- 
lators, which has abridged the capacity of 
our own language. And one may be sure 
that if darkness does still rest on any por- 
146 



The True Interpretation. 



tion of our version the fault lies in a hesita- 
tion to employ the full freedom of the Eng- 
lish tongue. But we do not say, in saying 
this, that any darkness, or shadow of dark- 
ness, still lingers over the work of the revis- 
ers because of their unwilHngness to remove 
it through any such cause, or that they were 
conscious of any such cause, even in regard 
to this rendering of Meravom. 

Most especially do we personally feel this 
when we have the great scholar and preacher 
in mind who sat so high in the counsels of 
the revisers, and upon whose endorsement of 
oiu- exposition of the Greek word we set so 
high a value. We have ventured to differ 
with him only on a question of judgment, 
wherein he may be wise and we unwise. 
He would not distiurb a rendering around 
which for ages many venerable associations 
have gathered, and the removal of which 
would disarrange many doctrinal concep- 
tions. As he looks upon it, to "displace" 
it would be to displace a corner-stone ; and 
though he is ready to admit that it was " orig- 
inally inadequate," yet he evidently thinks 
less harm would result if it were quietly and 
147 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Pcenitentia. 

Ill ■ • I - I 

gradually changed for another, which, though 
retaining the name, would be the genuine 
stone. Such a substitution, he thinks, would 
become practicable in the progress of public 
sentiment, or, as he calls it, " Christian use." 
Doubtless there are many who would agree 
with him in this method of meeting the enor- 
mous difficulty of repairing a very serious 
error which has so many ages for its sanction 
and a remote antiquity for its origin. 

Our own belief in the utter impractica- 
biHty of this way of dealing with it we have 
now tried to express in the best way we could. 
We would make the change at once in the 
text of the translation. We would remove 
the idea and the words "repe?it,'^ ''repe?ita7ice " 
from every part of the New Testament except 
where they represent the idea of MerafxeXeia ; 
and we would have it so, that no sermon or 
treatise should employ the expressions except 
in the sense of "sorrow" or *' regret." And 
we would do this now in the interest of truth, 
in the interest of genuine Christianity, in the 
interest of an age which does not fear to face 
a fact, whatever be the consequences. 

As we have said before, so we say again : 
148 



The True Interpretation. 



we do not believe in the process of "trans- 
figuration," when it is to be attempted upon 
a word of such a character, and containing in 
itself such a latent dogmatic force, as " re- 
pentance^ The only safety is in letting it, 
dogmatically, alone, in dropping it, dogmatic- 
ally, out, and in retaining it only in its pop- 
ular and strictly Scriptural sense — a regret for 
something that is past, and a regret that, in 
a matter of wrong-doing, may deepen into a 
" godly sorrow " ; and this " regret " we would 
always call "repent.'^ All this we say be- 
cause we believe that, so long as the word is 
used for MeraVom, the characteristic key-note 
of Christianity will give not only an uncertain, 
but a radically reversing, as well as a mis- 
leading, sound : the world will lose the orig- 
inal and innermost, the initial and guiding 
principle of the religion of Jesus Christ. 

In regard to the instances mentioned by 
Bishop Westcott of the successful transfigure- 
ment of "faith" and "grace," despite their 
Latin perversion, it seems to us that they 
are hardly a parallel. Only theologians are 
famiHar with any ancient association of those 
words which would despoil them now of their 
149 



The Eclipse of Metdnoia by Fosnitentia. 

depth and beauty. They have become thor- 
oughly Engh'sh. They have no harsh historic 
physiognomy to soften away. In neither of 
them are we obHged to hft off a Latin cowl in 
order to bare a Greek brow. The deep heart 
of their Greek originals is easily to be seen in 
the countenance of both. 

And now we must add, in view of the kind 
suggestion that in the work of " transfiguring " 
repentance, our essay may be "of eminent 
service," that we could look upon it with but 
little satisfaction if we thought that, after all, 
we had only succeeded in expounding the 
force of '' 7'epe7itance " in a way that reconciled 
the preacher and scholar the more to the old 
rendering, and had only helped, therefore, 
to confirm the esoteric position in which the 
word at present stands, namely, a position 
under which those who are learned may have 
one consciousness in reading it in the New 
Testament, and those who are not learned, 
another. 

In conclusion let us express again the im- 
mense satisfaction that we have taken in the 
remarkable definition of Meravom by this dis- 
150 



The True Interpretation. 



tinguished scholar and theologian, an eminent 
authority in Greek and a master in English, 
of world-wide fame. We place it with pride 
beside those of De Quincey and Matthew 
Arnold, as the expression of a spiritual per- 
ception and experience which combines the 
force of both: 

Merdvoia describes Characteristically in the 
Language of the Neiv Testame?it, a General 
Change of Mind^ which Becomes in its Full- 
est Development an Intellectual and Moral 
Re generation y 



151 



ASSENTING WITNESSES. 

The following letters — extracts for the 
most part — were written without a thought 
of publication. They are simple, unstudied, 
and spontaneous expressions of interest in 
the subject. They all refer, of course, to 
the first essay, and have been selected out of 
a large number (received from time to time 
since its publication) because of their sug- 
gestiveness, the weightiness of their indorse- 
ment, and their contributary character, in one 
way or another, to the substance of the essay 
itself. 

It was at first designed, when the reissue 
of the essay was thought of, to make each 
of them the base of a sort of excursus, of 
greater or less length — the whole group of 
which, taken together, leading out into vari- 
ous aspects of the subject, and developing its 
Scriptural and theological, as well as its philo- 
sophical and practical relations and bearings. 
152 



Assenting Witnesses. 



The material for all this has, however, been 
laid aside, under an exigency which has made 
it undesirable for the present reprint, and the 
plan has only been carried out in the in- 
stance of the first of the letters. (See the 
second essay.) There were several others of 
striking character which have consequently 
been omitted, as the field of thought they 
opened required especial consideration in 
order to elicit their true value. 



From the Rt. Rev. Brooke Foss Westcott, 
D.D., D.C.L., Bishop of Durham, late Canon 
of Westminster, and Regius Professor of Di- 
vinity, Cambridge ; a member of the Enghsh 
New Testament Company of the Revisers : 

" There was a reference to your essay in a paper 
on the Revised Version, in the * Expositor.' I have 
not a copy of the magazine at hand, but I think it 
was in the paper which appeared in August. 

" I intended to say that you had brought out with 
singular power and truth the meaning of Merdvo^a, 
while I could not see that the translation could be 
modified. 

"The preacher and the scholar must transfigure 
153 



Assenting Witnesses. 



' repentance,'' even as * fides'' and 'gratia ' have been 
transfigured. In this work your essay will, I trust, 
be of eminent service. 

" B. F. Westcott." 

II. 

From the Rev. Alexander Roberts, D.D., 
Professor of Humanity in the University of 
St. Andrews, a member of the Enghsh New 
Testament Company of the Revisers, and 
author of the " Companion to the Revised 
Version of the New Testament, Explaining 
the Reasons for the Changes Made in the 
Authorized Version." This handbook ac- 
companied the issue of the Revised Version 
in May, 1881. 

" I have read with much interest your thoughtful 
and valuable paper on ' Metanoia.' 

" The expression ' repentance,'' though plainly in- 
adequate as a translation of it, has so rooted itself in 
our language that it seems almost impossible to get 
rid of it. 

" However, we have manifestly entered on an 
epoch of revision, and I trust you will bring your 
suggestions under the notice of anybody that may be 
appointed, in order, if possible, to provide an Eng- 
lish version of the New Testament which may meet 
with general acceptance. . . . 

"Alexander Roberts." 
154 



Assenting Witnesses. 



From the same at a later date. 

" I hope some effectual means will be found for 
bringing your original and striking exposition of 
Mtrdvota under the notice of scholars in this country. 

" I shall see that it is submitted to those of my 
colleagues who are likely to take an interest in the 
subject. 

"Alexander Roberts." 



III. 



From the Rev. Howard Crosby, D.D., 
LL.D., ex-Chancellor of the University of 
New York, a member of the American New 
Testament Company of the Revisers. 

' ' I think you are quite right. 

" I have always taught that the Metanoia of the 
Gospel was not a sorrow for sin, but an abandon- 
ment of sin. 

" Its classical meaning is * a change of view and 
plan,' as in that intensely interesting part of Thucyd- 
ides where the Athenians order the destruction of 
the Mityleneans, and then on the next day repent. 
There is not a particle of mourning over sin in that. 

" Of course when one repents {fiETavoEi) from sin 
there will be a godly sorrow, but this is not in the 
word. 

" The Metanoia of the Jews was, as you say, a 
change of view (and plan) from the pronoian condi- 
155 



Assenting Witnesses, 



tion. Those at Pentecost thus repented, although, 
doubtless, the majority of them were truly godly 
men before. 

" Howard Crosby." 



IV. 

From the Rev. Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D., 
Professor of Sacred Literature in the Union 
Theological Seminary, New York, President 
of the American Revision Committee, author 
of " A Companion to the Greek Testament 
and the EngUsh Version," etc. 

" Many thanks to you for your able, excellent, and 
truthful article on the meaning of Merdfom, which 
has my cordial approval. 

" Conservatism prevented a change, and the diffi- 
culty of substituting a precise equivalent in one word. 
" Philip Schaff." 

V. 

From the Very Rev. E. H. Plumptre, D.D., 
Dean of Wells, a member of the English Old 
Testament Company. 

" Pray accept my best thanks for your very sug- 
gestive paper. 

' ' I quite agree with you as to the inadequacy of 
the accepted rendering of Merawm, but I do not see 
any way to a better one as yet. 
156 



Assenting Witnesses. 



' ' ' Resipiscence ' was an attempt, but it proved 
abortive. 

" * Change of mind ' or * principles ' or ' heart ' is 
cumbrous, and leaves the nature of the change unde- 
fined. 

" E. H. Plumptre." 



VI. 



From the Rev. Edward White, author of 
" Life in Christ," " Mystery of Growth," etc. 

" London, 1892. 

" Some one has sent me a copy of your tract on 
Merdvom, but the sender has remained anonymous. 

" I thank the sender anyway — and the author. 

" The argument has been familiar to me for fifty 
years, and I have always regarded it as unanswer- 
able and most important. 

" I learned its nature and irresistible force in early 
life by reading Dr. George Campbell's * Preliminary 
Dissertations on the Gospels ' (Principal of Marischal 
College, Aberdeen, Scotland) (Preliminary Disserta- 
tion No. VI.), where a very precise, full, and decisive 
argument, both critical and spiritual, fixes iht prac- 
tical sense of Merdvoia as you have done. 

" There are some valuable points brought out by 
Principal Campbell, which I think will interest you, 
in addition to your own. 

" No doubt Dr. Campbell's ' Dissertations ' are to 
be seen in some of your theological libraries. It is 
157 



Assenting Witnesses. 



a golden book, almost forgotten in the crowd of mod- 
ern works. 

" I trust that your endeavors will result in some 
wholesome teaching on the subject of the true Merd- 
voia in the United States. 

" Edward White, 

" Atithor of ' Life in Christ:'' 



VII. 

From the Rev. Alexander V. G. Allen, 

D.D., Professor in the Episcopal Theological 

School, Cambridge, Mass., author of "The 

Continuity of Christian Thought: A Study 

of Modern Theology in the Light of its 

History," etc. 

1884. 

" I have read your paper on the ' Metanoia,' and 
am greatly delighted with it. 

" The thought of it goes deep down into the very 
heart of the Christian revelation, and when the full 
meaning of your position is taken, one can see that 
it is the hinge upon which a truer and larger concep- 
tion of Christianity must turn. 

" It seems to me that we have been thinking in the 
same direction. 

" You have brought out the importance of the fact 
that the new revelation found its first expression in 
the Greek language ; and to that language we must 
turn, if we are to get the fresh original idea in the 
mind of its first disciples. 

158 



Asseftting Witnesses. 



" When the New Testament was translated in 
Latin there came a profound misapprehension of its 
central positions. * Metanoia ' is one word. So an- 
other is ' grace,' and another is ' justification ' — words 
which fall far short as Latin equivalents for the orig- 
inal Greek. 

" I have begun later than you in taking up the 
same issue; i.e., with the Greek fathers as the best 
interpreters of Christianity, because they were under 
the influence of that culture which was divinely ap- 
pointed to create a language for the new order. 

" The Latins disowned philosophy and human 
culture. They were inclined, like true Romans, to 
put all the mischief in the will ; heresy was a vicious 
wilfulness ; and the trouble with the will was a weak- 
ness or impotence toward right, which had been in- 
herited from Adam. This vicious direction of the 
will could only be overcome by omnipotent power 
bearing down all finite opposition, and this power 
which acts upon the will (grace) is conveyed through 
outward channels. 

' ' That was the substance of Augustinianism and 
of Latin Christianity. It disowned the intellect as 
having any vital connection with the regenerated 
life. 

" With the Greeks it was knowledge, which must 
overcome the ignorance of man ; but this knowledge 
carried with it the whole nature, as you have shown. 

" The essay is a beautiful, clear, and original state- 
ment of a great issue. 

^'A. V. G. Allen." 



159 



Assenting Witnesses. 



VIII. 

From the Rev. J. F. Garrison, D.D., Pro- 
fessor in the Protestant Episcopal Divinity- 
School, Philadelphia. 

" I hope the old saw, ' Better late than never,' will 
hold good in my acknowledgment, at this late day, of 
the interest and value of your article on * Metanoia.' 

" I have had my pen in hand many times to do it, 
but there was so much I wished to say about it that 
each time I waited for a ' more convenient season,' 
until now, in utter despair of finding leisure for this, 
I cannot refrain longer to tell you how profoundly 
important I feel the points you make to be. 

" I have been so deeply impressed with them for 
twenty years that I scarcely or never use the word 
* repenf in any of its Bible references without paus- 
ing to reiterate the true meaning of the mental and 
spiritual process implied in the Metanoia. 

" And I am sure that many of our most disastrous 
failures in commending Christianity to unbelieving 
minds — especially minds of a manly character — have 
their cause just here. 

" You have thought so much on the bearings of 
the idea that I need not tell you how or why. 

" What I wanted, however, especially to enlarge 
upon were certain of the collateral relations of the 
word, and its psychological connections, which I have 
felt to be at the same time confirmations of your views 
and expressions of its great meaning. 
i6o 



Assenting Witnesses. 



" I can only hint at them, as it has been my in- 
ability to write more fully which has let me hitherto, 
and I doubt not but they have occurred to you. 

" I. One of these is the analogy of the use of the 
word in the Greek of the LXX., wherein very often 
the passages rendered ' repent,'' etc., in the Author- 
ized Version are given in the Septuagint by WExavoziv, 
etc., with a most decided advantage to the clearness, 
consistency, and satisfactoriness of the passage. 

" 2. The remarkable significance of the word l&ovq 
and all its derivatives in the philosophic language of 
that age, as we learn this from the Greek, especially 
the Alexandrian, writers. And I more and more be- 
lieve that the language of the writers of the New 
Testament had much in common with this. 

*' I cannot pause even to outline my grounds for 
this, but they are so strong to my mind that if I were 
in the middle instead of near the end of my mental life- 
work I would make it the theme of an elaborate volume. 

' ' Now, in all the prevalent thought of that time, 
* thought ' {yovQ as its reality) and ' being ' were only 
two sides of one and the same essence. With them 
the Real was not, as with us, the Material, but the 
Noetic. What on the side of consciousness and ac- 
tual verity was vouv (thought), on its side of real ex- 
istence was twai. To think was ' to be, ' and ' to be ' 
was essentially thought. The Spiritual was the Real, 
and the only Real was the Spiritual. 

'* (And herein lies the essence of the endless dis- 
cussion on the Real Presence. The hard-headed 
Latin could never see that anything was Real that he 
could not represent as quasi Material.) 
i6i 



Assenting Witnesses. 



" Now, with this conception of voelv, go back to 
Metanoia, and we have the complete expression and 
magnificent sweep of the full thought. In changing 
the voelv of the man he has become changed in the 
very essence of his elvai ; ' all things have become 
new.' 

" I need not evolve the thought further. It lies 
at the foundation of the whole Alexandrian, or rather 
of the whole philosophic, thought of that age, and in 
Plotinus is developed to the dialectic system with 
which he hoped to rival Christianity, but which, by 
its one-sided character, made it only a sublime dream 
for the few instead of a divine life for the many. 

" 3. As a relique of my old medical life. Insanity 
is not, as I think, an error of reasoning. Who rea- 
sons so inexorably as an insane man? ' I am — my 
mind (vovg) tells me — a king. Therefore I can and 
will do as a king.' And all he does follows on strict- 
est reasoning from his voelv. Change his essential 
accepted thought — self — and at once he * is ' a differ- 
ent man. As he * thought ' in his essential self, so 
he ' was.' His Merdvota at once changes his entire 
' being.' 

" I have often presented this as a terrible analogy 
to the condition of man as a sinner. By nature he ac- 
cepts as the essential fact of his being, in his thought, 
' this world, self, sin, as all-real, all-sufficient.' Christ 
comes and says, ' Your whole being and thought 
are wrong. Meravoelre : let your whole being and 
thought turn from this. It is a lie, and you and your 
life, based on it, a delusion ; for there is a kingdom 
of the heavens which is THE truth,' etc. 
162 



Assenting Witnesses. 



" Here, again, I only put a finger-mark; but the 
meaning of the whole is, I thank you very heartily 
for your admirable and needed paper. 

"J. F. Garrison." 

IX. 

From the Rev. Elisha Mulford, LL.D., 
author of ''The Republic of God," "The 
Nation," etc. 

" The essay has very great value. It gives the 
view of the term which I have long held. 

" This is the one term which connects most clearly 
the errand of St. John the Baptist with the message 
of the Gospel. 

" It has more direct and full significance than those 
to which I note a reference in Hausrath's ' Times of 
Jesus,' tr., ii., p. 120. 

"The grammarians have always underrated De 
Quincey. 

"Elisha Mulford." 



X. 



From the Rev. Edward T. Bartlett, D.D., 
Dean of the Protestant Episcopal Divinity 
School, Philadelphia. 

" I am greatly indebted to you for your essay on 
the great New Testament word. 
163 



Assenting Witnesses. 



" At a glance I saw much of its value, but now 
that I have carefully studied it I think it wonderful 
and of permanent worth for its scholarship and its 
true fervor, the like of which in combination I do 
not remember to have ever seen. 

" The ability with which you present your great 
subject and marshal your grand argument seems to 
me absolutely perfect, and should make this essay 
one that will be the standard monograph on the sub- 
ject. 

" If I could wish for any addition to your treat- 
ment of the subject it would be as to the fuller de- 
velopment of the truth that the change of the mind 
itself may precede and lead to a change of circum- 
stance — the truth which Dr. Bushnell, e.g., brings 
out in those two tremendous sermons, ' The Bad 
Consciousness Taken Away,' and 'The Bad Mind 
Makes a Bad Element,' in his * Christ and His Sal- 
vation.' 

" I did not mean to say this, but will venture to let 
it go, almost sure, though, that upon further study 
of your essay, w^hich I intend to make, I shall find 
that you have given that truth all the emphasis it 
needed, and that I have been mistaken. 

"Again I thank you for the keen pleasure you 
have afforded me in your beautiful paper. 

" Edward T. Bartlett." 

From the same at a recent date. 

*' I am glad to know that a new edition of * Me- 
tanoia ' is to be given us. Strong evidence that the 
164 



Assenting Witnesses. 



view you take has permanently impressed thoughtful 
men as one of deep value and importance has been 
meeting me ever and anon for years. 

" My suggestion when I saw you in Boston was 
to this effect : that you should go straight through 
the New Testament and carefully work out each pas- 
sage where the word occurs, or its cognates, and show 
how the real meaning can be put into good smooth 
English expression. Some work I am doing has led 
me to study the matter closely and to try to do this 
very thing. ... It would not take much space. An 
appendix of a few pages would surely be enough. 
Such a thing would be most timely. I beg you to 
do it. 

"Edward T. Bartlett." 



XI. 

From the Rev. Benjamin Franklin, D.D., 
author of "The Creed and Modern Thought." 

" May I venture to express the great pleasure and 
sense of mental benefit with which I have read your 
article in the July number of the ' American Church 
Review ' ? 

" You have undoubtedly made an intrinsic contri- 
bution to the theology of the age, and given an illus- 
tration of what many have thought and some have 
said, viz. , that ' Catholic theology ' is as much alive 
in this age, and as well adapted to current thought, 
as it ever has been. 

" The article, while learned and able, of course, 
165 



Assenting Witnesses. 



is abreast of the age, and takes that humanly sympa- 
thetic yet distinctively Christian stand which primi- 
tive Christianity occupied. 

" As a work emanating from the theological school 
to which you are popularly assigned, it of course 
looks at the truth from its own point of view. 

' ' It does so admirably, however, and will, I hope, 
so permeate the mind of preachers that the Gospel, 
on its human side, may be better preached, and men 
induced to recognize and develop, in mind and heart, 
their original godUkeness. 

" B. Franklin." 



XII. 

From the Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D., 
Bishop of Massachusetts. 

** It is full of inspiration. 

"It makes one think of Christian faith as positive 
and constructive, and not merely destructive and 
remedial. 

" It makes the work of Christ seem worthy of 

Christ. 

"Phillips Brooks." 



166 



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